After four hands-on workshops our journey has reached its conclusion.

This March, Mirai’s workshops initiative focused on a topic of wide interest in the R Community: development of shiny apps. We undertook the journey from creating a first shiny application all the way to bringing it safely to production. With this series we shared our in-depth knowledge and professional expertise, and helped the attendees learning the basics of shiny, how to use, organize and customize input/output widgets, how to structure and develop an app in a professional way, and finally best DevOps practices for robust, reproducible and controlled workflow to production.

Overview of the shiny workshop series

The goal of the initiative was to empower and inspire R users with a toolkit that helps in sharing and visualizing data analysis, making more user-friendly data exploration, and enabling data-driven decision making, even for business users without deep technical skills.

Being professional shiny users for our daily work with our clients, and thanks to our extensive teaching experience, we could highlight the common pitfalls for beginners as well as shiny’s points of strength. Despite shiny being an amazing tool for fast prototyping and data exploration, we wanted to guide our attendees towards more advanced development approaches and emphasize the advantages of using best practices, like version control, code modularization, integrated (automated) testing, dependencies control, and collaborative and agile development process.

Why people like Mirai’s shiny workshop series

The workshop series was held online, which, while on the one hand limiting the personal interactions, has on the other hand allowed us to have a diverse and globally spread audience, some of which followed us in this journey from the beginning to the end, while others joined us along the way.

This second series has proved us once again how inspiring teaching can be. It is extremely satisfactory to share our own knowledge and to see attendees taking concrete and immediate advantage of it in their daily work. Moreover, the learning atmosphere is stimulating also for us experienced professionals: to go deeper into the concepts we lecture, to stay up to date with the novelties in the community, and to be curious about what the attendees bring into the lecture.

We would like to thank all those who made this workshop series possible and all those who participated. We do look forward to seeing you again at future workshops. Be ready for new announcements soon!

We always try to listen to the Community and to adjust our offer to the current needs and interests. Do you have some ideas you would like to share? Is there any topic you would like to dig more into and would like some professional experience support? We are happy to hear from you!

Did you miss our past workshop series but would like to attend the next time? Contact us and we will keep you informed about the announcement of new dates and new topics. If you get enough people, or if your team is facing a special issue we can schedule a workshop just for you: ask us for a quote.

Suggested reading:

• When to create a shiny app?
• What makes a good UI?
• What makes a shiny app professional?
• Feel confident about your Shiny App going to Production
• Techguides: CI / CD pipelines for automatic deployment of a Shiny App
• Techguide: Using renv to control dependencies at project level

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