Episode 21: Shiny App Stories with Nick Strayer

How the new Shiny App Stories came to life with Nick Strayer

In episode 21 of the Shiny Developer Series, I have the pleasure of welcoming back the newest member of the Shiny team, Nick Strayer! We discuss the road Nick traveled to join RStudio full time, as well as the motivation behind the terrific Shiny App Stories, complete with a hands-on demonstration of new features in Shiny 1.6 such as bindCache and dynamic theming in the fun explore your weather application. All of that plus Nick’s perspectives on the growing Shiny ecosystem and creating powerful data visualizations make this a must-see episode!

Resources mentioned in the episode

• Shiny App Stories example - The “Why” documentation, plus demonstrations of new and advanced features in the context of real-world applications.
• bindCache() - To speed up your app’s reloading of previously accessed data.
• Dynamic theming with bslib - bslib helps you theme your app really easily.
• session object
• getCurrentOutputInfo
• Data visualization innovators Nick follows: Nadieh Bremer (@NadiehBremer), Shirley Wu (@sxywu), Amelia Wattenberger (@Wattenberger).

Episode Timestamps

00:00:00 Episode Introduction
00:06:15 Nick’s journey since episode 5
00:08:10 Shiny app stories - an experimental form of documentation. Most documentation focuses on the How to do something, Shiny App Stories focuses on the Why
00:13:15 App Stories in action
00:16:25 bindCache() discussion on speeding up your Shiny app
00:22:57 Dynamic theming with {bslib}
00:27:00 The usefulness of the session object in an Shiny app
00:32:30 Including web-technologies (like custom js, css, incorporating better design philosiphies) in your Shiny app
00:39:50 On the Shiny Ecosystem. Nick only recently moved from being an active Shiny developer to being on the core-Shiny team itself
00:43:35 On Creating great data visualizations and offering data consumers an excellent user experience
00:56:25 What’s the best way to give feedback to the Shiny team?
01:05:22 Episode wrapup

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