Workshop “Shiny Train-the-Trainer”

This was a two day workshop. The first day was taught by Greg Wilson, and touched different points of teaching in general, and teaching programming lanugages. The second day was taught by Mine, and zoomed-in on Shiny apps and how to teach building Shiny apps.

Starting from the theory and building up, Greg was very charismatic. For me, some takeaways from the workshop were:

• Each time you start a new course, choose 1-2 things you want to improve/tryout. Don’t try to go “all-in” because then you might miss. Also, make sure that when you do implement new techniques, you don’t fall short on things you were doing so far which were good.

This is going to be slightly cumbersome (I’m also summarizing this for my own good).

A few things that helps organize and conduct sessions.

Conference Day 1

Here are some highlights:

• Joe Chang’s keynote: lots of tools for testing and profiling shiny apps. Speed improvments for shiny apps using cache (plotCacheRender()). Showd some techniques to make apps much quicker.
• API development with R and Tensor flow at T-mobile: A really cool use case for using shiny apps and plumber API. This is an example for scaling up a plumber api for a customer facing app.
• Databases using R: the latest: Edgar demonstrated how he connects to a google big query database. The big query server does all the computations and the clean (and smaller data) is input into R for continued analysis. Very cool.
• Working with categorial data in R without loosing your mind: some best practices for working with factors. Advocating forecats (actually much of these I already implement in my work anyhow).
• Melt the clock: tidy time series analysis: a talk about tsibble and fable, the packages which are about to replace the forecast and ts(), in a tidy-er version. Can be installed from github and should make life much easier for time series analysis.
• 3D mapping, plotting, and printing with rayshader: an extremely cool package for ploting maps from x-y-z (elevation data). A lot of options, and even includes an export for 3d printing of the models.
• gganimate Live Cookbook: A nice package for animating ggplots. But need to carefully choose when to use and when not to use it…

Conference Day 2

Great RMarkdown session – kind of made me rethink about how I do my work. For me personally a lot of the work envolves power point and word, but from now on, I think I’ll try to do it on RMarkdown. More reproduceable, easier to recreate, or update if needed.

• Yihui Xie talked about blogdown, bookdown, and more recently pagedown (for academic publications). I also came to know about Radix – a package for Academic style blogs. In the new RStudio (version 1.2 and above, currently in preview), there is an option to export RMarkdown documents into power point presentation. Works seamlessly, just change the yaml at the top:

---
title: "This is a power point presentation"
author: "I'm the author"
date: "..."
output: powerpoint_presentation
---

• The gt package was presented. A package which is great for generating html or \(\LaTeX\) tables.
• A cool feature of RMarkdown which I didn’t know about is parameters. It enables to creat variants of an RMarkdown document without actually changing the document. For more info see parameterized reports.
• Hadley Wikam talked about a new package in development vctrs that is supposed to improve type consistency in R. Here’s an example with factor and c’s default behaviour vs. the vec_c solution in vctrs:

c(factor("a"), factor("b"))
## [1] 1 1

vctrs::vec_c(factor("a"), factor("b"))
## [1] a b
## Levels: a b

• Jenny Bryan talked about lazy evaluation. Finally made some sense to me about when to use enquo() and when to use !!.
• Another good talk about the ipc package for Shiny apps which require heavy and async computations. That package is able to pass queue and interrupt messages between processes.
• David Robinson from DataCamp gave a really inspiring talk about what you can and should do openly (hence me writing this blog post, in the hopes that it’ll be the first of many).

Venue

I landed on Monday and the workshops started on Tuesday, so not too much time to hand around, but following the recommendation of the receptionist in my hotel (which was great, Holiday Inn Austin Town Center), I went to Terry Black’s – an original BBQ resteraunt, which was very good (apparantly also very high on TripAdvisor).

I also checked out the South of Colorado (SoCo) area – it was nice to walk around and by some small things for the wife and kids.

Parks around the Colorado River – real nice to walk around or jog.

Takeaways

• Use more RMarkdown and less powerpoint/word.
• Lot of tips on how to improve my R courses (which I should implement).
• Shiny is extremly powerful, much more than what I’m using today. Should probably find the time to improve my own Shiny building/programming skills.
• Do a lot more blogging with R and blogdown.