The Results Are In!

We recently ran an internal Shiny contest to see which Appsilon team member could make the best shiny.semantic PoC in under 24 hours, and today we have some winners to announce!

Which shiny.semantic PoC app is your favorite? There is still time to vote for the winner of the People’s Choice Award, which will receive a special prize. Voting is open until Friday, November 13th. 

Before we announce the winners, we would like to thank the Shiny team at RStudio. They very generously agreed to judge our shiny.semantic contest. For a previous collaboration between Appsilon and RStudio, see our joint webinar on Enabling Remote Data Science Teams. For RStudio’s blog post announcing the winners, go here. 

And now, the winners: 

• Most technically impressive: Polluter Alert by Paweł Przytuła
• Most creatively impressive: Semantic Pixelator by Pedro Silva
• Most technically impressive (runner-up): FIFA’19 by Dominik Krzemiński

We’ve asked each of the winners to leave their thoughts and reasons why they decided to build their dashboards. We’ll go through their comments on the development of each PoC app below.

Want to see all submissions? Check out our previous article.

Most Technically Impressive: Polluter Alert

Polluter Alert is a dashboard that allows the user to report sources of air pollution in the user’s geographical area.

We’ve asked Paweł, Appsilon Co-Founder and VP of Engineering, why he decided to make a Polluter Alter application. Here are his thoughts:

Air quality has been an important topic to me for many years. Every year during colder days in Poland (October through March), many cities are covered by dense smog because of heating stoves. Even worse, people burn anything and everything as fuel, even plastic bottles. This results in terrible air quality that causes lung diseases and allergies. I really wish we could do something about it. The government couldn’t improve this situation for many years. I got inspired when my colleague told me that the primary source of pollution in his district was a single factory chimney. We need more data to act smart. Maybe collaborative effort and crowdsourcing can help us build a map of pollution sources, which can help decision-makers?

You can test the application here.

Most Creatively Impressive: Semantic Pixelator

Semantic Pixelator is a fun way to explore semantic elements by creating different image compositions using loaders, icons, and other UI elements from semantic/fomantic UI.

Here’s what Appsilon team member and Shiny frontend magician Pedro Silva had to say about his PoC application:

I believe fun and gamification are great ways of getting familiar with new things. Knowing that semantic offers a huge library of different components, I wanted to showcase as many of those components as possible in unconventional ways. I feel the end result shows both how easy it is to get started with semantic, but at the same time how flexible and customizable it can be.

Pedro was previously a grand prize winner of RStudio’s 2020 Shiny Contest after building a functional video game in Shiny, so it’s no surprise that he fared well in our internal shiny.semantic competition. You can test his shiny.semantic application here.

Most technically impressive (runner-up) – FIFA’19

This app was created to demonstrate shiny.semantic features for creating interactive data visualization. 

Appsilon team member and Open Source leader Dominik shared his thoughts on the application:

I decided to create the FIFA dashboard to showcase that shiny.semantic can be a perfect choice for building data visualization apps. And also, I used to play FIFA way too much during high school.

Who doesn’t love a little football mixed with a lot of data? You can test the application here.

Vote for the People’s Choice Award

As mentioned earlier, we still have to determine the People’s Choice Award winner, and that award will be decided by the R Community. You can vote for any of the six submissions with this link. Keep in mind that all of these PoC’s were developed in under 24 hours, so naturally, there will be some space for improvement. We welcome any feedback on these PoC’s and on our shiny.semantic open-source package.

Please tell us what you think! You can place your vote here. 

Do you like shiny.semantic? Please consider giving us a star on GitHub. You can explore other Appsilon open source packages on our new Shiny Tools landing page. 

Appsilon is hiring! See our Careers page for new openings, including openings for a Project Manager and Community Manager.

Article RStudio Announces Winners of Appsilon’s Internal Shiny Contest comes from Appsilon | End­ to­ End Data Science Solutions.