Episode 30: The Connecticut COVID-19 Test Spotter App (Part 1)

By The Shiny Dev Series Team

March 23, 2022

Episode 30 of the Shiny Developer Series reveals just how the power of open source software can be used to provide meaningful improvement to our daily lives. In the first of a two-part series, chief data scientist Mike Thomas reveals the motivation behind his brilliant COVID-19 test locator Shiny application, empowering a local community in Connecticut to efficiently report and track availability of test kits in a huge time of need. After a tour of the application interface, Mike shares his favorite techniques to bring an efficient user experience and the backend integrations with APIs to bring production-grade features to life.

Resources mentioned in the episode

COVID-19 At-Home Test Spotter (App) - ketchbrookanalytics.shinyapps.io/covid_test_spotter
COVID-19 At-Home Test Spotter (Code) - github.com/ketchbrookanalytics/covid_test_spotter
App blog post - www.ketchbrookanalytics.com/post/ketchbrook-analytics-launches-website-to-help-connecticut-residents-find-covid-19-test-kits
Olivia Adams' interview with CNN - www.cnn.com/videos/health/2021/02/08/software-developer-builds-simple-massachusetts-covid-19-vaccine-website-olivia-adams-intv-newday-vpx.cnn
R Packages by Hadley Wickham and Jenny Bryan - r-pkgs.org
{googleWay} Shiny vignette - symbolixau.github.io/googleway/articles/googleway-vignette.html#shiny

Episode Timestamps

00:00:00 Episode Introduction
00:01:31 Mike’s introductiona and journey with R & Shiny
00:07:20 Data science consulting and Ketchbrook Analytics
00:11:40 Olivia Adams' inspiring story
00:17:40 Demo of Mike’s COVID-19 At-Home Test Spotter App
00:31:55 App code introduction
00:32:10 googleway package integrating the Google Maps API
00:36:25 Pulling addresses from map searches
00:41:10 Using MongoDB for records collection
00:43:15 bslib to simulate the multi-page app experience
00:46:20 Episode wrapup

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