Andrew Couch has a nice video about deploying a shiny app using docker. He goes from the very basics, that asume no knowledge of docker whatsoever, which is the position of many R users like myself. I’ve been working in some shiny app lately, and although I’ve never needed docker so far, I decided to start learning it because I can already foresee the future when it won’t be the case.

Andrew Couch tiene un video genial sobre como poner una aplicación shiny en docker. El video está en inglés, pero bien vale la pena. Va desde lo más básico, sin asumir ningún conocimiento de docker, lo cual es la situación de muchos usuarios de R como yo mismo. Últimamente he estado trabajando en unas aplicaciones Shiny y a pesar de que nunca he necesitado de Docker, ya puedo preveer el momento en que esto cambiará, por lo que decidí comenzar a aprender como usarlo.

A few weeks ago I opened an account on Digital Ocean to start my own cloud server. Not long after that I took a workshop on Shiny and, although it was too technical with nothing new for me, I learn a couple of things unrelated to R. The speaker was talking about the importance of making your portfolio showing your apps instead of sharing the link to your code as most of us do.

A couple of years ago I was interested in the efficiency of R when it comes to time processing and management of memory and I read a few blog posts about this topic, particularly pointing at the fact that R hasn’t been designed to be a very efficient language, especially when it comes to big data processing, and this could be its doom at some point in the future. By that time I also read a great article or blog post regarding the complexity of using the tidyverse family of packages in R, especially with the task of teaching R to beginners.