Articles by rstats | Emily Riederer

Using databases with Shiny

January 1, 2022 | rstats | Emily Riederer

Shiny apps are R’s answer to building interface-driven applications that help expose important data, metrics, algorithms, and more with end-users. However, the more interesting work that your Shiny app allows users to do, the more likely users ar...
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How to Make R Markdown Snow

December 10, 2021 | rstats | Emily Riederer

Last year, I tweeted about how to spread holiday cheer by letting your R Markdown documents snow. After all, what better to put people in the holiday spirit than to add a random 5% probability that whatever part of a document they are trying to read wi... [Read more...]

Workflows for querying databases via R

July 13, 2021 | rstats | Emily Riederer

Simple, self-contained, reproducible examples are a common part of good software documentation. However, in the spirit of brevity, these examples often do not demonstrate the most sustainable or flexible workflows for integrating software tools into large projects. In this post, I document a few mundane but useful patterns for querying ... [Read more...]

Introducing the {convo} package

December 29, 2020 | rstats | Emily Riederer

Back in September, I wrote about how controlled vocabularies can help form contracts between data producers and consumers. In short, I argued that aligning on an ontology of stub names for use naming variables in a dataset can improve data documentati...
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Column Names as Contracts

September 5, 2020 | rstats | Emily Riederer

Software products use a range of strategies to make promises or contracts with their users. Mature code packages and APIs document expected inputs and outputs, check adherence with unit tests, and transparently report code coverage. Programs with graphical user interfaces form such contracts by labeling and illustrating interactive components to ...
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A beginner’s guide to Shiny modules

July 25, 2020 | rstats | Emily Riederer

Recently, I argued the case on Twitter that Shiny modules are not an advanced topic and can actually be a great way for novice Shiny developers to start building more complex applications. My Shiny hot take is that modules are **not** an advanced topic. IMHO it's so much easier and ...
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Resource Round-Up: Latent and Lasting Documentation

July 2, 2020 | rstats | Emily Riederer

The importance of documentation is uncontroversial. For many data and analytical products, documentation is the user interface and key to promoting user success and future reuse. However, when project timelines get tight, too many data products are considered complete without appropriate documentation. Even when these resources initially exist, they too ... [Read more...]

RMarkdown CSS Selector Tips

June 29, 2020 | rstats | Emily Riederer

When working with R Markdown’s HTML output type, it’s possible to add a custom style to your output by passing in a CSS style sheet to the YAML header like this:
output:
  html_document:
    css: "my-style-sheet.css"
To use CSS effectively, it’s critical to understand how to specificy which selectors one wishes ...
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RMarkdown Driven Development: the Technical Appendix

January 31, 2020 | rstats | Emily Riederer

Motivation My initial post on RMarkdown Driven Development focuses on major concepts in the process of evolving a one-time, single-file analysis into a sustainable analytical tool. In the spirit of Etsy’s immutable documentation, I intentionally minimized references to specific tools or packages. After all, software is transient; principles are ...
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Resource Round-Up: R in Industry Edition

August 29, 2019 | rstats | Emily Riederer

One of the ways that practices of reproducible research can be brought into industry is through the development of custom R packages and data tools for one’s company / organization. Not only can these tools deliver large efficiency gains and standardization, they ideally infuse corporate culture with the shared passion ... [Read more...]

Rtistic: A package-by-numbers repo

May 24, 2019 | rstats | Emily Riederer

Last winter, I attended a holiday party at a “paint-and-sip” venue. For those unfamiliar, “paint-and-sip” is a semi-trendy cottage industry offering evenings of music, wine, and a guided painting activity. For example, my group painted sasquatch on a snowy winter’s eve: As often happens, this completely unrelated thing set ...
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RMarkdown Driven Development (RmdDD)

May 3, 2019 | rstats | Emily Riederer

Introduction RMarkdown is an excellent platform for capturing narrative analysis and code to create reproducible reports, blogs, slides, books, and more. One benefit of RMarkdown is its abilities to keep an analyst in the “flow” of their work and to capture their thought process along the way. However, thought processes ...
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