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
   

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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
   

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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
   

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4. 2019-01-07
   2019-03-08
   So many apps!
   

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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
   

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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
   

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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
   

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8. ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨
   

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9. ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨
   Most
   technically
   impressive:
   iSEE
   

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10. by Kevin Rue, Charlotte Soneson, Federico Marini, Aaron Lun
    

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11. Designed for
    interactive
    exploration of
    high-throughput
    biological
    data sets Novel
    cross-linking
    between
    panels
    Generate a
    reproducible R
    script!!!
    

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12. Most
    technically
    impressive:
    iSEE
    ✨ ✨ ✨
    Best design:
    69 Love Songs:
    A Lyrical
    Analysis
    

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13. by David Smale
    

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14. Incredible visual
    appeal,
    especially with
    colours that
    match album
    cover Web scraping,
    text analysis,
    wide variety of
    visualisations
    Thoughtful
    storytelling!
    

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15. ✨
    Most fun:
    Hex Memory
    Game
    Best design:
    69 Love Songs:
    A Lyrical
    Analysis
    Most
    technically
    impressive:
    iSEE
    ✨
    

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16. by Victor Perrier
    

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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
    

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18. Best design:
    69 Love Songs:
    A Lyrical
    Analysis
    Best design:
    69 Love Songs:
    A Lyrical
    Analysis
    Most
    technically
    impressive:
    iSEE
    ✨
    Awww:
    Pet Records
    

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19. by Jenna Allen
    

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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!
    

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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!
    

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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
    

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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!
    

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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
    

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27. What’s next?
    

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28. shiny.rstudio.com/gallery
    

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30. rstd.io/shiny-contest-2020
    

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31. MAKING THE CONTEST
    Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel
    shiny.rstudio.com/gallery
    rstd.io/shiny-contest-2020
    

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