How Anchorage Built Alaska’s Vaccine Finder with R
summary
Alaska’s vaccine finder is a one‑week R prototype that scrapes provider pages into structured tables, launches a mobile‑first HTML table UI, and scales with Heroku and S3. It uses rvest, httr, dplyr and lubridate, runs scraped every 60 seconds cron jobs via Heroku R Buildpack, aggregated diverse sources and survived surges (peaks of 20–40k pageviews/day, about 5 million HTML pages scraped total). The site connects thousands to appointments and evolves into modular, error‑handled data services.
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chapters (22)
- 0:00Alaska vaccine rollout challenges
- 1:32Anchorage Innovation Team
- 2:15Senior citizens access problem
- 2:58Weekend prototype in R
- 4:01Simple HTML frontend
- 4:43Prototype testing with call center
- 5:24Unexpected launch expansion
- 6:06Statewide vaccine finder launch
- 7:12Governor's announcement handling
- 7:54Success through adaptability
- 8:37Traffic spikes and timelines
- 9:19Million page views scaling
- 9:40Scraper to stable system
- 10:22Data pipeline modularization
- 11:0424/7 appointment tracking
- 11:47Eligibility simplification
- 12:49MVPs and prototypes power
- 13:33Unexpected data set value
- 14:15R for rapid prototyping
- 15:23Speed and flexibility matter
- 15:46Build fast appreciation
- 16:06R as a superpower
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