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Pretty Good Hat

Tag: rstats

Sharing a quick tip that I’ve found useful while building with Shiny, recently: It’s handy to be able to save off the current state of a data set for bringing over to a scratch file. I made the download link appear only when running in my local environment. This way I can easily snapshot my in process data set for experimenting with visualization in my scratch file.

In ui.R:

    if(interactive()) {
      downloadLink("downloadData", "💾️ Download data set") 
    }

And in server.R:

    output$downloadData <- downloadHandler(
      filename = function() {
        paste("shiny-export_", Sys.Date(), ".csv", sep="")
      },
      content = function(file) {
        write.csv(globaldata$armor, file)
      }
    )

Screenshot displaying rows of armor items and their stat values

Screenshot showing a scatterplot of stat values for a selected armor configuration

I’ve had a nice afternoon working on my hobby R/Shiny project, a loadout finder for the game Destiny 2. These improvements make it a lot more flexible and informative: It can now optionally include armor that would otherwise be filtered out of configurations by the minimum stat threshold, and it will show current mods used in displayed loadouts.

ArmoreR: A Destiny 2 Loadout Finder

I’m sure it poses some benefits for systematic parsing (and I’m certainly much more comfortable working in R and markdown, for what it’s worth) but Jupyter’s reliance on json for its file format seems like a big disadvantage for readability and portability.

I: Spend days carefully curating config files, reinstalling homebrew and trying variations of arm and x86 binaries

RStudio: Do you even ODBC, bro?

I: Just profanely put the path to the driver in the dbConnect call, disregarding all documentation and common sense.

RStudio: Yah here’s your SQL Server.

Dearest Ada, it has been two days since I began editing odbcinst.ini, and still SQL Server repels me. Tomorrow, we will sudo brew reinstall FreeTDS. With our persistence, someday, odbc::odbcListDrivers() shall yield results and I will be at peace.

/wistful violins

A screenshot showing armor statistics for loadouts in Destiny 2

This revision of ArmoreR is really turning into something I’m happy with and proud of. I’ve learned so much since the very first iteration of this about a year ago. It’s really fun and rewarding to come back to it with a bunch of new expertise and make it much better in all ways, including a new approach to dealing with such a large amount of information.

screenshot showing a set of colorful scatterplots displaying a variety of armor types and their stats

I spent a bunch of the weekend beginning a redesign of my ArmoreR project, which aims to be a Destiny 2 armor stats profiler built in R and Shiny. A year on from when I began it, I have a much better understanding of how a Shiny app works, and have also incorporated a proper, working oauth2 workflow into this revision (incorporating the things I figured out for my power level tracker). It’s really, really satisfying to be rebuilding it with all the things I’ve learned. I think the application is going to be so much better and less complicated than the first iteration. I still have a ways to go, and am happy with just how much I have transformed it with a year of learning and practice on other things.