There are many fantasy sports out there. Since I'm from England I like playing fantasy football (that's football, also known as soccer where I am now). Rules are pretty straight forward - pick a team of players from the Premier League and score points depending on how they perform. Most British leagues work on the …

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There are several ways that users can be managed in Shiny apps but they all require access to the config file. User access can be managed within the app itself using a database to hold user information. Two examples are given below: The first utilizes a simple database in which the passwords are not encrypted (not …

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For the 2016/17 Premiership season some friends set up a fantasy football league for kids to play against their dads. My son wanted his own team but doesn't know much about Premiership players and their abilities so we decided to look into writing some code to pick a team for him. Our target was to pick a team, within …

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I've taken to using R Notebooks for many of the tasks that I used to write in R Markdown. Advantages are that code chunks can be executed independently, leading to easier management and debugging, and that the output is still a usable document. There are times, however, when I would like to include a large table or …

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Our dishwasher broke and was beyond repair. Time for a new one. Fortunately Black Friday was approaching so there were plenty of deals to be found. It seems it's now easier than ever to pull information off the web and much of it is in a usable format so, if you ask me to identify a replacement dishwasher, web-scraping …

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So why write a blog and why write it now? I'm not a writer. I won't even pretend to be a writer. That's something reserved for my wife (she is actually a professional writer). I do, however, spend quite a bit of time writing code and it's now time to articulate some thoughts and share code. I'm also getting to the …

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