Episode 9: Shiny Dev Center & Education with Mine Cetinkaya-Rundel

By The Shiny Dev Series Team

March 10, 2020

The Shiny Developer Series is back! In our first session of 2020, we are joined by professional educator and data scientist Mine Cetinkaya-Rundel from RStudio to get the inside story of the newly updated Shiny Dev Center (including a major revision of the Shiny Gallery) and the insights RStudio gained from the Shiny Contest. Also Mine shares her advice on developing educational material for Shiny users and where she sees future opportunities in this evolving space.

Resources mentioned in the episode

Episode Timestamps 

00:56 Mine Introduction.
03:01 Shiny Gallery - walkthrough and recent revamp.
04:15 Shiny Demos - live examples and deep-dive into shiny's features.
05:20 Shiny User Showcase - A large set of example shiny apps, by the Shiny community. Including code on github, and interactive code on rstudio.cloud. 
06:10 Shiny Contest 2019 lead to the revamp of the showcase. 
09:00 Example running an app on the Shiny Showcase interactively with rstudio.cloud.
12:40 Shiny Gallery walkthrough - Mine's learnings from reviewing the Shiny apps on the gallery. There's a lot to learn from, but Mine highlighted just a few: 
13:40 1. BYOD Apps - Bring your own data shiny app best practices.  
14:42 2. App Walkthroughs and jintrojs package. iSEE Shiny App. 
17:15 3. Apps that don't look like Shiny apps. 
17:30 Example 1. 69 Love Songs by the Magnetic Fields.
18:25 Example 2. Uber explorer app - another example that doesn't look like a standard shiny app. 
19:04 Example 3. CRAN Explorer. 
19:55 Example 4. Hex memory game. An example of a game Shiny app. 
22:15 Teaching and Educational Materials for Shiny - Shiny development has its own set of challenges and Mine spends a lot of time thinking about teaching Shiny.
23:45 Learn Shiny tutorial - a nice short intro to Shiny. Includes written articles, videos, and code examples.  shiny.rstudio.com/tutorial. 
24:30 Asking good questions about the issues you're having with your Shiny app. What are good workflows for seeking help? Barret's Shiny debugging and reprex guide http://community.rstudio.com/t/10001
26:17 Materials for intermediate Shiny users. Articles on shiny.rstudio.com, workshop and conference videos, and a call to the Shiny Community. 
28:00 Also for advanced Shiny developers, Hadley's Mastering Shiny book. Coming late 2020 mastering-shiny.org. 
30:10 Shiny Contest 2020 - learnings from last year's contest, and advice to folks submitting to the next contest. https://blog.rstudio.com/2020/02/12/shiny-contest-2020-is-here/
39:12 Shiny Dev Series Outtro