R Package for Downloading FIRST API Data

[sirwin]

Thanks for the positive feedback.

[sirwin]

ngreen, let me know if you run into any glitches with the package, either here or in the issues section of the github repository. I was only able to test it on a couple different computers.

I considered both R and Python with the Pandas package for developing this package, and I initially played around with the FIRST API in both languages. I think Python is better as a general purpose scripting language and I found the documentation for Python to be much easier to understand than R's documentation. But for some random reason, early on, I made more progress in R than in Python.

I'm experimenting with a Shiney app as well. I think Shiney could work well for building an application to present our scouting data to the drive crew -- I'm going to see if our scouting group is interested in pursuing that project. If we come up with any interesting R data visualization techniques we'll post them on the github webpages for the firstapiR package.

[Conor Ryan]

Thanks for starting the API! With the right community for R, we can really bring the beginnings of data science to the masses. Machine Learning for alliance selection? K-Means for determining balanced alliances? We can really go a step further here than what exists today.

Originally Posted by sirwin

I'm experimenting with a Shiney app as well. I think Shiney could work well for building an application to present our scouting data to the drive crew -- I'm going to see if our scouting group is interested in pursuing that project. If we come up with any interesting R data visualization techniques we'll post them on the github webpages for the firstapiR package.

I've been doing a lot of work with Rshiny for work lately and it is easily the best interface for rapid prototyping of R data applications. Highly recommended, in 20 minutes you can have a quality interface. If you get proficient at it there are a lot of great job opportunities out there.

After R the next leap forward is Scala, but this is a great place to be today.