Making the Shiny contest

In January 2019 RStudio launched the first-ever Shiny contest to recognize outstanding Shiny applications and to share them with the community. We received 136 submissions for the contest and reviewing them was incredibly inspiring and humbling. In this talk, we shine a spotlight on the backstage: the inspiration behind the contest, the process of evaluation, what we learned about Shiny developers and how we can better support them, and what we learned about running contests and how we hope to improve the Shiny Contest experience. We also highlight some of the winning apps as well as the newly revamped Shiny Gallery, which features many noteworthy contest submissions. Finally, we introduce the new process for submitting your apps to the Shiny Gallery and, of course, to Shiny Contest 2020!

Transcript

1. MAKING THE CONTEST Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel
2. https:/ /community.rstudio.com/t/announcing-winners-of-the-1st-bookdown-contest/16394 “With this contest, I want to encourage bookdown users to share your authoring experience and the extensions you have developed to make it even easier for other users to write their own books, reports, and dissertations, etc.” - Yihui Xie, 2018 Inspiration
3. 2019 ✨ We love seeing and sharing all the exciting apps, dashboards, and interactive documents Shiny developers have produce ✨ When Shiny developers openly share their code and process for so others can learn from their experience ✨ Our former User Showcase featured some fantastic apps developed by the Shiny community, but not all apps had their code available Motivation
4. 2019-01-07 2019-03-08 So many apps!
5. https:/ /community.rstudio.com/t/shiny-contest-submission-tidytuesday-rocks-an-interactive-catalogue-of-tidytuesday-tweets-from-2018/25205 Code (GitHub repo) ☁ RStudio Cloud project ✨ Deployed app required ✍ Summary Highlights Screenshot nice to have Runner up - Impressive game - Super clean code outcome Participating
6. What we said ✔ Apps will be judged based on technical merit and/or artistic achievement (e.g., UI design) ✔ Evaluation will keep in mind that some apps may excel in one of these categories, some in the other, and some in both ✔ We will also consider feedback/reaction on RStudio Community
7. What we did Calculate percentiles of likes, bin submissions in 3 categories Browse a random sample of 15 deployed apps to help develop a rubric First pass of all deployed apps to categorise into consider further or not Rate all passed submissions on the rubric, making sure all three components are there For any app that scores in the top 30, make sure RStudio Cloud project works and produces the same result, if not, move to next app, and then, pick top 15 apps among these Evaluate top 15 apps more thoroughly (with Joe!) to pick winners 1 - 5 Technical merit 1 - 5 Artistic achievement 1 - 3 Narrative 0 - 3 Feedback
8. ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨
9. ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ Most technically impressive: iSEE
10. by Kevin Rue, Charlotte Soneson, Federico Marini, Aaron Lun
11. Designed for interactive exploration of high-throughput biological data sets Novel cross-linking between panels Generate a reproducible R script!!!
12. Most technically impressive: iSEE ✨ ✨ ✨ Best design: 69 Love Songs: A Lyrical Analysis
13. by David Smale
14. Incredible visual appeal, especially with colours that match album cover Web scraping, text analysis, wide variety of visualisations Thoughtful storytelling!
15. ✨ Most fun: Hex Memory Game Best design: 69 Love Songs: A Lyrical Analysis Most technically impressive: iSEE ✨
16. by Victor Perrier
17. Any attempt at a game with Shiny is incredibly impressive, and this one works so well! Clean, easy to reason code, despite its complexity
18. Best design: 69 Love Songs: A Lyrical Analysis Best design: 69 Love Songs: A Lyrical Analysis Most technically impressive: iSEE ✨ Awww: Pet Records
19. by Jenna Allen
20. Keeping vaccination and other medical records for Layla and Lloyd Incredibly effective timeline visualisations Use of drill- downs, all the way to vaccine certificates in PDF!
21. Lessons learned ✴ Participants should categorise themselves into experience levels ✴ Code review across developers who don’t work in the same team following the same style/workflow guides is difficult!
22. Runner up: CRAN Explorer - Very striking CRAN explorer - Great example of HTML Template usage, with extremely clean separation between the R UI and the raw HTML UI
23. Lessons learned ✴ Participants should categorise themselves into experience levels ✴ Code review across developers who don’t work in the same team following the same style/workflow guides is difficult! ✴ Start reviewing earlier so we can turn the results around faster!
24. Lessons learned ✴ Participants should categorise themselves into experience levels ✴ Code review across developers who don’t work in the same team following the same style/workflow guides is difficult! ✴ Start reviewing earlier so we can turn the results around faster! ✴ Help contestants by providing more guidance for what makes a good submission
27. What’s next?
28. shiny.rstudio.com/gallery
30. rstd.io/shiny-contest-2020
31. MAKING THE CONTEST Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel shiny.rstudio.com/gallery rstd.io/shiny-contest-2020