Published: November 10, 2026.
Our clinical trial agent from part 1 lived in an R console, which suits one person. A trial team needs something in the browser. In this post we put the agent in a Shiny app with {shinychat}, so several people can ask questions at once, each in their own conversation, with every tool call on show and file uploads refused.
Published: September 25, 2026.
There are ten public training courses left in 2026, covering Python, Shiny, ggplot2, statistical modelling, machine learning with Tidymodels, and Git. Dates for January to June 2027 are also open for booking.
Published: August 21, 2026.
With shinyapps.io due to close in 2026, all content is moving to Posit Connect Cloud. We take a look at some benefits of the new service and demonstrate how you can deploy content to Posit Connect Cloud from a GitHub Actions workflow.
Published: May 1, 2026.
A full schedule of online data science training courses is now available through to November 2026, covering R, Python, machine learning, statistical modelling, Shiny, and more. All sessions run online over six hours.
Published: March 12, 2026.
Introducing the Frontend Dashboard Health Check!
Published: November 20, 2025.
A brief introduction to Figma Design and some its most useful features, aimed at creators of data dashboards.
Published: November 3, 2025.
This October, Jumping Rivers hosted the fourth installment of our conference "Shiny In Production". Here we summarise the talks and workshops that were presented.
Published: July 24, 2025.
Do you use R? Would you like to play a part in sustaining it? Find out about the R Dev Day that is returning as a satellite event to Shiny in Production 2025.
Published: June 30, 2025.
In regulated industries, Shiny apps must be reliable, reproducible, and well-documented. Validation builds trust, supports compliance, and prevents costly delays. Learn how to avoid common pitfalls and set up a lightweight, effective validation approach that scales with your needs. Validation isn’t a blocker, it’s a long-term advantage for you and your team.
Published: May 20, 2025.
The details of all of our workshops for Shiny in Production are now live on the conference website. Read on for full details all in one place.
Published: April 15, 2025.
At Jumping Rivers we love data dashboards and are delighted to announce the release of a gallery to showcase our application-development skills.
Published: April 8, 2025.
All our videos from Shiny in Production 2024, collected together in one place.
Published: March 27, 2025.
In this blog I will demonstrate how to use sparkline reactable tables in a Shiny app. Thankfully {reactable} has some helpful functions that make this super easy!
Published: March 11, 2025.
Due to popular demand we are extending the abstract deadline for Shiny in Production 2025, to be held on 8th-9th October 2025 in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. Read on for more details on how to submit your work.
Published: February 17, 2025.
We are excited to announce the Call for Abstracts for Shiny in Production 2025, to be held on 8th-9th October 2025 in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. Read on for more details on how to submit your work.
Published: February 13, 2025.
This is part one of a multiple part blog series, in which I will be demonstrating how to create inline visualisations using the {sparkline} R package.
Published: January 30, 2025.
This post, Part 2 in a series of two, looks at styling and deploying the Observable Framework app we built in part 1.
Published: January 23, 2025.
The fourth instalment of Shiny in Production is back this October, hosted at the Catalyst in Newcastle upon Tyne, with super early bird tickets deadline for Shiny in Production ends on the 31st of January.
Published: January 16, 2025.
This post, Part 1 in a series of two, looks at porting the functional code of a Shiny app - written in R - into JavaScript code to be used in an Observable Framework application.
Published: December 24, 2024.
In this short Christmassy blog we will show you how to use {ggplot2}, {sf} and {gganimate} to create a festive animation of a sparkling Christmas tree.
Published: December 19, 2024.
Here, we’ll talk about music in R, what packages are available, how to represent musical notation, and what people are actually doing with music data in R.
Published: November 14, 2024.
This year Shiny in Production hosted an "R Dev Day" split over the two days before the pre-conference workshops. R Dev Days are a new initiative of the R Contribution Working Group, providing an opportunity for R developers to get involved in contributing to the R Project. R Dev Day will be back at SIP 2025, so read on to find out what participants got up to and consider coming along next year!
Published: October 17, 2024.
The 9th and 10th of October saw the third Shiny in Production conference hosted by Jumping Rivers. Here we share the highlights from our fabulous talks and workshops.
Published: July 4, 2024.
The details of all of our workshops for Shiny in Production are now live on the conference website. Read on for full details all in one place.
Published: June 27, 2024.
R has come a long way since it's initial public release in August 1993. Explore some highlights of the last thirty years in an interactive timeline.
Published: May 30, 2024.
We are excited to announce the Call for Abstracts for Shiny in Production 2024, to be held on 9th-10th October 2024 in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. Read on for more details on how to submit your work.
Published: January 11, 2024.
Shiny applications are easy to set up. However, as they often contain sensitive information, care should be taken. This post discusses standard server headers that can be set to harden your application.
Published: December 14, 2023.
Inspired by Colin Fay's Shiny in Production 2022 talk, "Destroy All Widgets", this blog post series explores how to use Google Lighthouse to measure the performance of your Shiny apps. The last blog in the Lighthouse series uses Google Lighthouse to see the differences each component has on the app times.
Published: December 7, 2023.
Inspired by Colin Fay's Shiny in Production 2022 talk, "Destroy All Widgets", this blog post series explores how to use Google Lighthouse to measure the performance of your Shiny apps. In this second post of the series, we show how to use lighthouse to analyse your app's start-up times.
Published: November 30, 2023.
Inspired by Colin Fay's Shiny in Production 2022 talk, "Destroy All Widgets", this blog post series explores how to use Google Lighthouse to measure the performance of your Shiny apps. In this first post of the series, we show how to run and read Google Lighthouse reports.
Published: October 19, 2023.
On October 12-13 2023, Jumping Rivers hosted the Shiny in Production conference, delving into all things Shiny! Read on for a rundown of the event highlights.
Published: September 28, 2023.
There's only two weeks left to go until Shiny in Production 2023! The events team are hard at work getting things ready for the day, and we wanted to take this opportunity to say a huge thank you to our event sponsors!
Published: July 6, 2023.
Earlier this year, two data scientists from Jumping Rivers ran an outreach activity for 14-19 year olds across the UK, in collaboration with the youth charity Speakers for Schools.
Published: June 8, 2023.
Browsers have been implementing variations on a JavaScript fullscreen API for over a decade. Unfortunately, for much of that time the APIs varied across browsers. This made actually using it in production somewhat cumbersome. In this blog, we show you how to put parts of your Shiny application into fullscreen with only a few lines of JavaScript.
Published: April 27, 2023.
Learn how to create a clickable word cloud that you can use as an input to e.g. filter observations displayed in a table, using wordcloud2 in a Shiny app.
Published: March 16, 2023.
Sometimes you want to go beyond the default {shinydashboard} theme. This blog will take you through 3 options—built-in colours, the {fresh} package, and CSS.
Published: February 16, 2023.
By automating a few tasks using continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines, developers at Jumping Rivers spent less time on the trivial and repetitive tasks, and more time making improvements where it really mattered.
Published: January 26, 2023.
This post covers the "why?" and "how?" of making Shiny applications feel like they respond instantaneously to users' interactions.
Published: January 19, 2023.
It pays to extract out some helper functions and / or classes from your test cases. By doing so, your tests will look simpler, the behaviour that you are testing will be more explicit, and you'll have less code to maintain.
Published: January 12, 2023.
Here, we will write a simple shiny app (as an R package) and show how to generate tests for this app using {shinytest2}.
Published: January 5, 2023.
Automated testing is an essential part of any production-quality software project. Much of the focus in the R world is on testing the individual components of a project, but for those working with {shiny} there are great tools that can test your application as if a user was interacting with it. In this blog series, we focus on {shinytest2}.
Published: November 3, 2022.
The arrival of Shiny for Python was announced at the RStudio Conference a few weeks ago. In this tutorial I will take you through how I created a simple Shiny for Python dashboard, with no experience using the framework in R.
Published: October 27, 2022.
There are an increasing number of open-source "add-on" packages that extend both the front end and the back end functionality of Shiny. This blog will highlight 5 UI add-on packages that can massively improve your user experience and also just add a bit of flair to your app.
Published: October 20, 2022.
Deploying shiny applications can be frustrating, making sure your production environment matches your local environment where you can see your application running. In this blog post we explore how we might start writing code to automate the process of creating Dockerfiles for producing images that make our local, running, shiny application able to be deployed in a container.
Published: October 18, 2022.
Here at Jumping Rivers we like to keep our courses up to date so we can bring you training on the latest tools and technologies. To this end, we have recently added two new courses to our listing!
Published: October 13, 2022.
On October 6-7 2022, Jumping Rivers hosted the Shiny in Production conference! The conference delved into the world of {shiny} and other web based R packages.
Published: August 23, 2022.
RStudio conf 2022 had some exciting reveals. Certainly one of the most interesting releases was that of shiny, the excellent web application development framework known in the R community, getting a Python release. Here we will take a first look at creating a simple application.
Published: July 21, 2022.
RStudio Connect supports a spectrum of data products, static or dynamic, developed in R and Python: Dashboards, applications, APIs, reports, and much more - we can also host ReactJS applications! This series will focus on recreating a Shiny App tutorial using ReactJS. In part 3 will demonstrate how to host an application on RStudio Connect.
Published: July 14, 2022.
RStudio Connect supports a spectrum of data products, static or dynamic, developed in R and Python: Dashboards, applications, APIs, reports, and much more - we can also host ReactJS applications! This series will focus on recreating a Shiny App tutorial using ReactJS. In part 2, we will walk through an example.
Published: July 7, 2022.
RStudio Connect supports a spectrum of data products, static or dynamic, developed in R and Python: Dashboards, applications, APIs, reports, and much more - we can also host ReactJS applications! This series will focus on recreating a Shiny App tutorial using ReactJS. In part 1, we introduce the required concepts and technologies.
Published: June 21, 2022.
The great strength of Shiny is that it simplifies the production of data-focused web applications, making it relatively easy to present data to users / clients in an interactive way. However, data can be big and data-processing can be complex, time-consuming and memory-hungry. In this post we demonstrate how we tackled this issue in a recent project.
Published: June 14, 2022.
The organisation for Shiny in Production is well under way - our list of speakers is now up on the conference website, and registration is open, with Early Bird tickets available until July 31st! Read on for more details.
Published: May 19, 2022.
Web content accessibility is an important topic to consider when building web based applications. {shiny} is an excellent tool that allows data practitioners a relatively simple, quick approach to providing an intuitive user interface to their R code via a web application. Here we explore accessibility in the context of a {shiny} application.
Published: May 13, 2022.
This October, Jumping Rivers will be holding our Shiny in Production conference! Hosted in the centre of Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK, this conference will delve into the world of {shiny} and other web based R packages.
Published: May 12, 2022.
The web is an increasingly critical resource for many aspects of life. Striving to make your content accessible is essential to provide equal opportunity and access for all.
Published: March 12, 2021.
We are expanding the Jumping Rivers team. If you know {shiny} then this could be the perfect role for you!
Published: October 13, 2020.
Don’t we all miss 2019 (blame Covid for the long delay in this post). The days of going to work and seeing your work colleagues face to face - and for some of you, attending one of our on-site training courses! 2019 was a great year for us.
Published: April 21, 2020.
So RStudio Connect has embraced Python and now runs Flask applications! At Jumping Rivers we make a lot of use of R, shiny, and Python for creating visual tools for our clients. Shiny has a lot of nice features, in particular it is very fast for prototyping web applications.
Published: September 9, 2019.
At Jumping Rivers we’re always to want to branch into the data science community, and so this year we’re going to quite a few conferences in the autumn. You can catch us at: GSS (Government Statistical Service) Conference - Edinburgh.
Published: August 16, 2019.
Big news. RStudio recently started certifying trainers in three areas: the tidyverse, Shiny and teaching. To be certified to teach a topic you have to pass the exam for that topic and the teaching exam. Even bigger news. Four of your lovely Jumping Rivers trainers are now certified to teach at least one topic!
Published: January 28, 2019.
Jumping Rivers is a data science company based in Newcastle. We are not sector based and our clients range through all industries. We are looking for individuals who enjoy a challenge. Main Duties Technical Duties: Provide technical training, Development of bespoke statistical algorithms, Building web applications using R and Shiny, Data analysis using R and/or Python.
Published: October 15, 2018.
I love R and I love Shiny. One of the things I really like about shiny is the ease with which you can incorporate other Javascript based tools and libraries. By my own admission, my JavaScript skills are definitely lacking but there are so many cool libraries out there which can really make visualisation and interaction with displayed content come alive.
Published: April 20, 2018.
The results of the eRum competition are in! Before we announce the winners we would like to thank everyone who entered. It has been a pleasure to look at all of the ideas on show. The Main Competition. The winner of the main competition is Lukasz Janiszewski.
Published: April 20, 2018.
Well well well, we’ve only gone and won The Water Hub hackathon! Well, joint winners but the main word is WINNER. First of all we want to say thank you to all the guys at the Water Hub and the Sunderland Software Centre for organising and inviting.
