Date Conversion Utility

It has been several weeks since I’ve made any substantial posts to the blog. I’ve been working on several projects while trying to maintain a consistent pace with the Ph. D. research. Finally, I have a complete product from one of my projects that I am able to share. Presented, is my first web based application that allows users to transform between different time systems. While the utility lacks novelty as there are other applications online with similar functionality, the focus of developing the web application was an exercise to learn R programming.

I was introduced to R by my friend Vachan. He works as a Biostatistician and R is a commonly used tool in their field. My interest in R was sparked by its ability to make web based applications using a package called Shiny. For several weeks I’ve been trying to convert some of my Matlab software into web based utilities, as it would allow me to share some of the functions I wrote with the wider GNSS community. While it is possible, it was taking too much time to work efficiently and the documentation online was very limited. Once Vachan had installed rStudio (and the necessary libraries) on my computer and taught me the basics, I was able to develop and launch my first web based application within a week. I still have alot to learn with in R, but I am been really impressed and I expect data conversion utility is the first of many web based applications to come.