Persistent storage on Shinyapps.io: Storing your survey responses responsibly

In this post, I will outline how I set up persistent storage and transfer of data from a Shiny survey to a MariaDB using SSL certificates. How I set up the survey and how I handled URL redirects in and out of the survey are topics for future posts. Coming up with a satisfactory solution to this problem took a lot of trial and error (and Googleing…). It turned out that all of the challenges related to persistent storage, sending data to a database, preventing SQL injection attacks and securing the data traffic with SSL certificates had existing solutions.

March 6, 2020 Read
The Pursuit of Fellowship to the Higher Education Academy

As an early career academic with ambitions of a career in academia, I spend much of my time and energy on doing research and writing papers. This is what we are judged on. This is what matters. Or is it? When I entered academia as an undergraduate student, I did not find many of my teachers and lectures impressive. The classes were large and mostly consisted of covering the material on the blackboard, overhead (yeah - some still used that in the mid 00s) or PowerPoint.

February 28, 2020 Read