Shiny community, hackathons, and his AI mindset | Joe Cheng | Data Science Hangout

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We were recently joined by Joe Cheng, CTO at Posit, to chat about the Shiny contest, the use of AI in data science, and designing hackathons for learning new technologies. We were joined by several past and present Shiny contest winners who gave great advice on how to get started if you want to participate (and we really hope you do)!
In this Hangout, we explore the evolution of the Shiny contest since its inception, including what made the 2024 submissions unique and the ways the contest encourages community contribution and learning. Joe also shared about his personal journey from feeling skepticism about AI to seeing and embracing its potential. We got some amazing questions from the Hangout attendees! We hope you join us live next time to ask some of your own questions 👀
Resources mentioned in the video and zoom chat:
🔗 2024 Shiny Contest Winners → posit.co/blog/...
🔗 Joe's AI Hackathon Slides → jcheng5.github...
🔗 Shiny Assistant → gallery.shinya...
🔗 Isabella's blog post on prototyping with Shiny Assistant → posit.co/blog/...
🔗 Posit Conf Workshops → reg.rainfocus....
🔗 Shiny Conference 2025 → www.shinyconf....
🔗 Call for Speakers Shiny Conf 2025 → sessionize.com...
🔗 Shiny Tableau → rstudio.github...
🔗 Echarts4r → echarts4r.john...
🔗 Elmer package on Github → github.com/tid...
All the Shiny app links mentioned in the video and zoom chat:
🔗 Eric Nantz 2021 Shiny Contest Submission → forum.posit.co...
🔗 Eric Nantz's R/Pharma conference keynote on AI → • Joe Cheng - Summer is ...
🔗 Eric Nantz's Haunted Places app → • Eric Nantz - A Tour of...
🔗 Umair Durrani's Shiny Storytelling app → umair.shinyapp...
🔗 Umair's Blue Sky profile → bsky.app/profi...
🔗 Umair's Shiny meetings project on Github → github.com/shi... 🔗 Abby Stamm's Shiny Accessibility app → github.com/ajs...
If you didn’t join live, one great discussion you missed from the zoom chat was about everyone's favorite interactive plotting tools. Someone asked whether Plotly was the best option, and lots of people said they loved ggiraph, echarts4r, ObservableJS, and others. What about you?! What's your favorite interactive plotting library?

[@EkShunya]

i like the idea of 1 day workshop idea :)

[@sophiaa594]

Yay! It's awesome that someone very close to the company (and with a healthy dose of skepticism) is in the CTO role and has had space to explore what exactly is going on with AI/how it might impact Posit.