It's no secret we're huge fans of R Shiny - after all, it provides an excellent framework for building highly-scalable apps and dashboards with little to no web development knowledge. Other companies also want to jump on this train, but oftentimes don't know how.

That's the idea behind today's article. We'll give you 7 options to consider when you or your company need help with Shiny, ranging from online materials to workshops and professional code reviews. So without much ado, let's dive into the first one.

Interested in best practices for deploying your R/Shiny application? Here’s what you need to know as an individual and for your enterprise. 

Table of contents:

• Shiny Training Options
• Get Help with Shiny Workshops
• A Solid Foundation for Shiny
• Online Materials to Learn Shiny
• Professional Code Reviews to Get Help with Shiny
• Discovery Workshops
• Team Extension as a Help with Shiny Option
• Summing up Getting Help with Shiny

Shiny Training Options

When it comes to learning the most of Shiny in the shortest time frame possible, individual training sessions might be a good way to go for your organization. You have several options, but in this section, we'll list three.

Individual R Shiny Trainers

A training session with a person that has a ton of experience should put you and your company on the right track. As far as individual trainers go, you can't go wrong with Pacha.

Pacha is a certified Tidyverse and Shiny instructor and can help you with transferring spreadsheet knowledge to code and R Shiny. Each session is tailored toward customer needs and is held via Zoom. You can take a look at the brief demonstration and read the blog on the link above.

Posit Academy

Now, Posit Academy isn't Shiny-specific, but instead a great way for you and your team to learn data skills. It's a mentor-led training based on a curriculum tailored to your needs, and full of practical examples and exercises.

The Academy takes a different approach than most of the other resources you can find. You can expect interactive lessons followed by weekly project milestones shared through weekly group sessions. You'll also meet regularly with the Academy mentors and get personal guidance.

Get Help with Shiny Workshops

Workshops can help you learn a new skill (like R Shiny), or help you to keep relevant in the field (e.g., a specific advanced workshop for a given technology). We'll list a couple you can take a look at right now, and also show you the best way to keep up to date with the upcoming workshops and live sessions.

Another option is to attend specific advanced-level workshops either online or in person. If the online format better suits you and you want to dive deep into various aspects of R Shiny, our monthly Shiny Gathering webinars and yearly ShinyConf might be what you're looking for.  

How can you keep up with the latest R Shiny events? We have a Shiny Weekly Newsletter that will keep you updated with the upcoming conferences and workshops. Make sure to subscribe - it's free!

A Solid Foundation for Shiny

A big talking point with our customers, especially in Pharma, is that managers don't understand whether their engineers are building apps that will contribute to work after they leave.

That's one of the reasons we developed Rhino, which is a framework for enterprise Shiny applications. Rhino enables these managers to enforce a certain standard or uniformity throughout their projects that adhere to industry standards.

Here are some resources to get help with Shiny by using Rhino:

• Official Tutorial - Create your first Rhino app
• Rhino for Shiny Developers - Top 5 software engineering skills Rhino brings to Shiny
• Redesigning dashboards with Shiny and Rhino: World Bank's carbon pricing
• Designing accessible research with R/Shiny

Online Materials to Learn Shiny

Whether you prefer books or courses, there are plenty of online options to help you learn R Shiny. We'll list a couple of them here we consider to be top-notch, so don't hesitate to check them out.

Official Shiny Tutorial packs everything needed to get you started building R Shiny apps. It goes from the absolute basics to building real-world apps and also provides resources to level up - in a form of video series and workshops.

Mastering Shiny by Hadley Wickham is an excellent introduction to R Shiny, covering basic UI, layout, graphics, reactivity, and best practices in much depth and with a lot of examples. The best part - the book has a completely free online version. There's also a dedicated book club series on Youtube covering individual book chapters in video form.

Building Web Applications with Shiny in R is a video course offered by DataCamp. It provides a concise introduction to Shiny with some hands-on exercises. If you've ever watched one of their courses, you know what to expect. If not, well, it's only a couple of hours of materials, but packed really densely.

Looking for more free resources for learning Shiny? Here's our list of top 7 best free books and courses.

Professional Code Reviews to Get Help with Shiny

Code review helps you as a developer to improve the code quality before shipping it to production. It's more or less a second opinion on your solution implementation and is typically used to identify bugs, problems in logic, and some other issues.

They are important because they prevent shipping unstable/suboptimal code to customers. Therefore, it's essential to make them a part of the software development team's workflow.

Code reviews are sometimes domain-specific, and that's especially the case when we're discussing getting help with Shiny. We found them to be a great way of understanding how you're structuring your apps and what are some potential bottlenecks.

Discovery Workshops

Discovery workshops are an essential part of large-scale Shiny projects. Whenever you need a Shiny application tailored to your specific needs, there's no way around it, and it ensures the best quality results in the long run.

We typically assign an engineer to your case to work with you for 5 days. Its job is to go over your goals and use cases, so we can get a crystal clear picture of what has to be done. It's a bit more work in the first place but pays dividends later.

If you think your project is too complex and don't know where to start, feel free to reach out. We'll respond in 24 hours.

Team Extension as a Help with Shiny Option

Not everyone has a long time frame for a Shiny project. And yes, you can definitely make impressive R Shiny dashboards in a couple of days or a couple of weeks, but we prefer to think long-term.

Why? Well, it's often not possible to go from zero to covering every possible use case, edge case, and feature in a short time frame. Moreover, cramming extensive tests in such a short time frame is also a nightmare, and assuming something will go wrong eventually is pretty much a safe bet.

That's the reason why we generally look for projects with a duration of at least 3 months - it's not too long, but is usually enough to ensure the top-notch quality of your app. The time frame increases with the project's complexity, but 3 months is somewhat of a minimum.

Summing up Getting Help with Shiny

And there you have it - options to get help with Shiny app development ranging from DIY to leaving it to professionals - and everything in between.

It's essential to consider the project time frame and skills you already have in the company when deciding which route to take. For example, it makes little sense to invest time and money into educating employees if Shiny is part of a single short-term project. On the other hand, dedicated workshops and academies are a catch if you're seriously considering Shiny as a part of your tech stack.

If you want to leave it up to professionals or need consultations, make sure to drop us a message.

Interested in leveling up your R/Shiny team skills? Download our free ebook to learn more.