3MW (5 perspectives from ShinyConf 2023)

Guten Tag!

Many greetings from Ulm, Germany.

ShinyConf 2023 happened last week and there were many fantastic talks. Today, I’ll share my most favorite learnings from last week.

All talks were recorded and will be uploaded to Appsilon’s YT channel in a month or so. So, you can watch them once they’ve been published.

One short question before we start. I’ve been wondering about the length of 3/5MW for a while now. Should the length change? Let me know by clicking on one of these options:

Modules are great

I knew that before. Still, it was nice to hear everyone agreeing that a great Shiny app is a modularized app. And in case you don't know how modules work, I have a 100 seconds explainer for you and if that’s not enough, check our my seven minute demo.

I really liked Emily Riederer’s talk which demonstrated a 3-part framework on how to create new features for your app. Basically, the three parts are

• Module UI

• Module server

• Module demo app

With this triplet, you can work exclusively on a single new feature. And once that is done, you just drop that module into your existing app. This isn’t rocket science, I know, but it was nice to hear it spilled out.

Modules can return values

In Marcin Dubel’s talk, I learned that module servers can return reactives 🤯 Instead of just dropping the module server into your main app like so

You make your module server return a reactivve and then assign that in your app’s main server. In the next example, I use this to return the number of times a module button was clicked. This way, you could use that number in the rest of your app.

Learning Shiny for Python can be a great reason to learn Python

Winston Chang made this point in his keynote. His reasoning was as follows:

• Apparently, Shiny for Python is easy to learn if you know R Shiny - even if you don’t know Python yet.

• If you start working at a company that uses Python exclusively, you can still contribute if you know Shiny for Python.

• And because Shiny isn’t as popular in the Python community as in the R community (yet), you could even be an expert for your company in that area.

This concludes this week’s 3MW. I hope you enjoyed this week’s issue and I wish you a great week! 🙃 

In the subscribers-only part, we talk about using Shiny in production and beautiful new UI elements from {bslib}.

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