Hi, I'm Dean

R-Shiny Expert / Software Tool Builder / Extreme Traveller

Hi, I'm Dean

R-Shiny Expert / Software Tool Builder / Extreme Traveller

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Mimicking a Google Form with a Shiny app

Posted on June 14, 2015

In this post we will walk through the steps required to build a shiny app that mimicks a Google Form. It will allow users to submit responses to some input fields, save their data, and allow admins to view the submitted responses. Like many of my other posts, it may... [Read More]

New shinyjs version: Useful tools for any Shiny app developer + easily call JavaScript functions as R code

Posted on May 31, 2015

About a month ago I made an announcement about the initial release of shinyjs. After some feedback, a few feature requests, and numerous hours of work, I’m excited to say that a new version of shinyjs v0.0.6.2 was made available on CRAN this week. The package’s main... [Read More]

Analyzing R-Bloggers' posts via Twitter

Posted on May 17, 2015

For those who don’t know, every time a new blog post gets added to R-Bloggers, it gets a corresponding tweet by @Rbloggers, which gets seen by Rbloggers’ ~20k followers fairly fast. And every time my post gets published, I can’t help but check up on how many people... [Read More]

How to get your very own RStudio Server and Shiny Server with DigitalOcean

Posted on May 9, 2015

If you want help setting up your Shiny Server, a one-on-one walk-through of these instructions, or just general consultation about using Shiny Server, I’m available for hire. If you’ve always wanted to have an RStudio Server of your own so that you can access R from anywhere,... [Read More]

Introducing shinyjs: perform common JavaScript operations in Shiny apps using plain R code

Posted on April 23, 2015

shinyjs is my second R package that managed to find its way past the CRAN review process. It lets you perform common useful JavaScript operations in Shiny applications without having to know any JavaScript. Important note The package has improved a lot since writing this post. I highly... [Read More]

Supplementing your R package with a Shiny app

Posted on April 21, 2015

The R community is generally very fond of open-source-ness and the idea of releasing all code to the public. Writing packages has become such an easy experience now that Hadley’s devtools is so powerful, and as a result there are new packages being released by useRs every single day.... [Read More]

Flake it till you make it

It's not always cowardly to walk away; it can be very difficult, yet enlightening, to not be afraid to step off a path, regardless of how much you've already walked it

Posted on April 2, 2015

My mom recently showed me a very interesting bit from a book she was reading called ‘Soulshaping’ by Jeff Brown. I’ll discuss it later, but first, here is the excerpt: Under what circumstances should we step off a path? When is it essential that we finish what we start?... [Read More]

ggExtra: R package for adding marginal histograms to ggplot2

Posted on March 29, 2015

My first CRAN package, ggExtra, contains several functions to enhance ggplot2, with the most important one being ggExtra::ggMarginal() - a function that finally allows easily adding marginal density plots or histograms to scatterplots. Availability You can read the full README describing the functionality in detail or... [Read More]

Knitr's best hidden gem: spin

Stop knitting & start spinning - spin can help you write reports much faster and avoid repeating yourself

Posted on March 24, 2015

Anyone who loves the idea of dynamic report generation with R is probably a big fan of knitr and its flagship function - knit. But not many people seem to know about knit’s awesome cousin - spin. What is spin? In short: knitr::spin... [Read More]

Beautiful Jekyll - how to build a site in minutes

A plug-n-play template to easily get anyone a free nice looking site (same theme as this one) quickly

Posted on March 12, 2015

Since this site went live a few days ago, I had many people ask me how I made it. Like a great politician, I will avoid that question almost entirely with a completely different answer: The core template that runs this website is available for anyone to use. I called... [Read More]