The Past and Future of Shiny Keynote at rstudio::conf(2022)

Nan Xiao 2022-08-17 2 min read

I constantly feel lucky to witness the growth of the R web framework, Shiny, in the past ten years. In his keynote speech at rstudio::conf 2022, Joe Cheng shared an excellent summary of Shiny’s achievements and exciting outlook.

I am deeply moved by the story about how Shiny was created and Joe’s journey, and I recommend you watch the talk recording below if you haven’t. Notably, after Hadley’s Mastering Shiny book, the community-maintained awesome list awesome-shiny-extensions was again highlighted in Joe’s talk from 24:00 to 24:33 (thanks so much for the shout-out!).

rstudio::conf 2022 Keynotes - The Past and Future of Shiny - RStudio

Timestamps

  • 0:00 Introduction
  • 1:45 10th anniversary of Shiny
  • 2:35 How Shiny started
  • 6:07 Why UI programming sucks
  • 8:33 Meteor
  • 11:44 The birth of Shiny
  • 13:05 A personal story
  • 16:53 Seven weeks later
  • 18:20 Team Shiny, 2012
  • 18:50 Three big questions
  • 20:20 Q: Are R users ready to write web apps?
  • 23:04 Q: Will the R community respond?
  • 28:06 Q: Can we even build it in R?
  • 35:28 Three big questions, answered!
  • 35:57 Introducing Shiny for Python
  • 39:18 Shiny for Python example: air mass calculator
  • 40:48 Editor support for Shiny for Python
  • 41:35 Deployment options for Shiny for Python
  • 44:20 The future of Shiny is R and Python
  • 44:40 Visual editor for Shiny UI
  • 46:11 shinytest2
  • 47:00 Team Shiny, 2022
  • 48:28 Q&A

A heartfelt thank you, to Joe Cheng, Team Shiny, and all the developers in the community, for developing and extending this framework that helps numerous people create incredible interactive web experiences every day.