It doesn’t get much better than playing around with data that mean a lot to you. For me, that’s my Strava data (yes, I do recognize that that might sound a bit silly) – I’m fortunate enough to have near-immediate access to some of the greatest hiking trails around (yes, I also recognize that I’m totally biased), and spending my free time romping around our local mountains has been so important for my mental health. So, when I was ready to do my first real deep-dive into learning how to build Shiny apps and dashboards, I knew these were the data I needed to use.

This is very much an ongoing work in-progress, but the first version included a “Gear Garage” for tracking mileage on my hiking boots and bike, an activity heat map of all recorded hikes, bike rides, and walks, visualizations for exploring activity distance and elevation gain, and an interactive table of the raw data.

There are many more visualizations and features I’d love to add (but have been severely lacking the time to do so). I also still manually retrieve new activities using the Strava API via the {rStrava} package, but I hope to automate this in the next version. Stay tuned!

In an effort to increase transparency surrounding student demographics and post-graduation career placement statistics, The Bren School hired R Shiny Developer Fellow, Halina Do-Linh in summer 2022. Halina designed and built v1.0 of the public-facing dashboard for exploring these data.

Since then, the proverbial torch was passed to me for continued maintenance and updates. I collaborate with the Bren Admissions and Career Services Teams, as well as MEDS Program Coordinator, Jamie Montgomery, to update data, modify visuals, and refactor the code, as needed, each year. My most significant contribution so far is the Spring 2025 refactor and development of comprehensive wiki documentation. This rewrite focused on establishing a consistent, organized code structure and workflow, and on clearly documenting a standard operating procedure to support future updates.

My first freelancing adventure(!) was spent porting the Openscapes website from {blogdown} to Quarto and redesigning aspects of the website’s layout, styling, and overall functionality. I worked closely with Julie Lowndes (founding director of Openscapes) and Stefanie Butland (core Openscapes team member) to bring their vision to life and it was seriously such a fun project. I wrote a blog post about my experience / some of the highlights. Check it out!