ShinyConf 2025 Recap: Highlights, Community Moments, and What’s Next
ShinyConf 2025 brought together the global Shiny (R and Python) community for three energizing days of learning, building, and connection.
This year’s edition marked another leap forward for Shiny, from AI-powered tools to mobile app exploration and inclusive dashboard design.
Whether you joined live or are catching up later, here’s your all-in-one recap of what went down at ShinyConf 2025 and what to look forward to next.
📊 Quick Stats
This year’s virtual conference was our biggest yet:
- 3 days
- 2500+ attendees
- 80+ speakers
- 5 expert-led workshops
- 36 talks and presentations across two tracks
- 23 additional Shiny app showcases in a dedicated segment
- 5000+ live chat messages exchanged during sessions
- 1 amazing community
We hosted participants from around the world in a packed schedule that blended technical deep dives, strategic discussions, and practical tools for building better, faster, more inclusive Shiny applications.
Curious how this year compared? Read our ShinyConf 2024 recap.
🎥 Watch the Replays
All talks and workshops are available on-demand for the next 12 months via the ShinyConf 2025 Replay Hub.
You can browse by date, speaker, or topic, and build a custom watchlist using the “Schedule” feature. Whether you want to explore performance tuning or explore mobile apps built with R, you’ll find something valuable.
📝Please note that if you need captions/subtitles they are available in the replays.
🧠 Workshop Highlights
This year’s five workshops were practical, hands-on, and highly relevant:
- Optimizing Performance in Shiny – Tips to reduce load times and improve app responsiveness
- Why Is It Triggering Twice? – A much-needed deep dive into Shiny reactivity, led by Douglas Mesquita
- Designing Inclusive Shiny Dashboards – Real-world accessibility strategies from the Minnesota Department of Health
- DIY: Unclog Your Scripts with Plumber – A practical guide to modularizing long scripts
- Shiny for Python – Transferring R Shiny knowledge into Python, making it easier to bridge teams
Each workshop was designed to help attendees apply learnings immediately to their current projects, whether they work in government, pharma, research, or tech.
Want to apply ideas from the performance optimization workshop? Check out our tutorial on enhancing shiny application performance.
📌 Curated Watch List
Across two tracks, the talks touched on a wide range of topics, from pharma innovation, AI implementation, and personal productivity to Shiny internals. If you're not sure where to start, here’s a selection of talks that resonated with attendees across industries:
✨ AI Meets Shiny
From building LLM-powered apps in just two function calls to using generative AI for documentation and UX design, this year’s conference made it clear: AI isn’t the future of Shiny, it’s already here.
- Keynote: AI and Shiny by Winston Chang
- Building LLM-Powered Shiny apps via ellmer and chatlas
- AI Kung-Fu: Training Your Model in Two Function Calls
- Building State-of-the-Art RAG-LLM Applications
- Can an AI Pass the Shiny Developer Interview?
- Building LLM-Powered Shiny apps via ellmer and chatlas
- Building AI Bots With R-Shiny
- Practical LLMs in Shiny
- Harnessing Agentic AI with Shiny
In case you missed it, Winston Chang demoed Shiny Assistant and the latest VS code extension that embeds it in the IDE. We have a blog post detailing this coming up very soon!
These sessions explored how to integrate large language models, automate tasks, and rethink user interaction with intelligent dashboards.
🧰 Best Practices for Developers
- Theming Made Easy: Introducing brand.yml for Shiny
- Adoption tracking for Connect Shiny applications
- Enhancing Projects with Pre-Commit Hooks, {renv} Profiles, and Release Management
- Scaling Shiny: From Hobbyist Projects to Enterprise Deployments with Posit Connect
- Deploy with Confidence: Strategies to Minimize Failure and Maximize Success (on Posit Connect)
- In the Nix of Time
- Yet Another Year in the Rhinoverse
- Shiny as a Service - leveraging Auth0 and Stripe
- Creating and Sharing Scalable Applications with Shiny
🌐 Ecosystem Expansion
- Beyond {shiny}: The Future of Mobile Apps with R – Colin Fay
- Choosing the right tool for interactive dashboards: flexdashboard, Quarto, or Shiny
- Interactive Shiny Applications in R Documentation with {roxy.shinylive}
- No-Code Dashboards with the {blockr} Ecosystem
- Building Elkem's R Universe, One Package at a Time
🧪 Clinical Research and Pharma Innovation
- Keynote: Transforming Clinical Trials with Shiny
- Diagnosing Autism with R Shiny
- Interactive Reporting with Shiny for Clinical Trial Management
- Lightning Talk: Exploring the Pharmaverse
- Bridging Open-Source and Enterprise: Integrating {teal} into Shiny Frameworks
- {gsm.app}: Extensible Clinical Trial Monitoring Apps
- Open Source in Pharma: Transforming Medical Monitoring for Clinical Trials with {ClinSight}
🌍 Dashboards That Work for Everyone
Accessibility wasn’t an afterthought. It was a core theme. The “Designing Inclusive Shiny Dashboards” workshop reminded us that visualizations are only useful when they’re usable by all.
Remember to also check out Beyond the Rainbow: Why Color Is Key to Effective & Inclusive App UI Design.
🎸 Creative Applications
One of the most delightful surprises came from the Guitar Study Tracker Dashboard, a fun, personal project showcasing how Shiny can support self-learning and hobby tracking. It was a great reminder that data dashboards aren’t just for business or science; they can support growth and creativity too.
LLMs in Action: Building with Shiny & AI in Just 4 Hours
One of the most energizing segments of the conference was the Tiny Shiny Hackathon, where participants had just four hours to build a working Shiny app using AI.
The winning creations were showcased during the conference in a session titled "LLMs in Action: Building with Shiny & AI in Just 4 Hours", followed by a panel discussion where the developers shared their process, challenges, and lessons learned. It was a powerful demonstration of how quickly ideas can be brought to life with the help of AI and how Shiny remains a flexible canvas for experimentation and innovation.
Whether you're new to AI or looking for ways to accelerate your development, this session is well worth a replay.
We will have a blog post that will share more details about the hackathon, so stay tuned!
📂 Speaker Decks and Replays
Did you miss a session? Want to revisit your favorites?
🔁 All session replays are available on RingCentral and will stay on-demand for 12 months.
📚 You can also check out the collection of speaker decks and slides, including at the Reception area:
- Jeremy Winget – BID Framework
- Carson Sievert – Branding in Shiny
- Jasmine Daly – User-Centric Shiny
- Albert Rapp – AI Chatbots in Shiny
- Colin Fay – Future of Mobile Apps with R
- Umair Durrani, Aga Rasińska, Isabella Velásquez, Daniel Chen, Ryszard Szymański, and many more.
In the reception area, you’ll find the full list of presentations. Check out the list here.
🙌 Thank You to Everyone Involved
This conference wouldn’t have happened without the incredible effort from so many people.
💡 Speakers - You brought the knowledge, experience, and practical advice that made every session valuable.
🎤 Moderators - You kept the conversations flowing and helped us connect across time zones and topics.
🛠️ Technical Support Team - You made sure everything ran smoothly behind the scenes.
🧭 Program Committee - A huge thank you to the entire team who helped shape the conference’s direction, ensuring a diverse and impactful program.
And of course, thank you to every attendee who tuned in live, checked out the replays, asked thoughtful questions, and contributed to the community spirit that makes ShinyConf so special.
🚀 What’s Next?
The conference is over, but there’s more. Here’s what’s ahead:
- Attend our Shiny Gathering on the 29th of April: FDA Pilots: Key Insights, Lessons Learned, and What’s Next for 2025
- Attend our Shiny Gathering on the 27th of May: ShinyGatherings x Pharmaverse: Presenting aNCA: From Idea to Clinical Impact
- Sign up for our Pharma Brief newsletter on LinkedIn and our extended version ,Pharma Brief Extended available via email.
- Download our latest ebook: Clinical Data Analysis: Open Source in Pharma
We’re already excited for next year. Until then, keep building and keep learning! See you at ShinyConf 2026!
