Learning DevOps, Unfortunately

Accepting my fate and building robust software.

I have said in the past that sometimes I need to learn things outside of my direct area of interest in order to get better at what does interest me. At the time it was learning web development basics (HTML, CSS) in order to share my analyses with the world and make them more attractive. I have reached another round of this process, and may have even accepted my fate less begrudgingly than previously.

I found myself stuck while working on a project for Code for Baltimore. The goal was to build a web application that could visualize where nonprofits operate in Baltimore City and the connections that different organizations share. I spent time learning Shiny and built a simple interactive web application in a short amount of time. Managing its infrastructure became a frustratingly difficult task. All I needed was to build an application, host it on a web service under a custom domain, and automatically re-deploy everytime changes were pushed to Github. What became complicated were all the restrictions around hosting while keeping the tool free as it was only a proof of concept.

There were several problems, but they all boiled down to Shiny not being an out-of-the-box solution if you don’t want to host it on shinyapps.io. It is simple enough to host on Heroku, AWS, GCP, or others but only if you are building in something like Node.js, Python, or Go. I wanted to continue building in R if possible, but more importantly I wanted to make end-to-end web app development possible to others with little DevOps knowledge even if they don’t use those languages. Many in the R community come from a statistical background and not a CS/software background; getting stuck without experience in deployment is frustrating.

Ultimately I built Shinyhero as a template for Code for Baltimore developers to reduce as much friction as possible when building a solution. This could be extended to anyone interested in building production-grade web applications without experience in robust deployment solutions. It utilizes concepts like containerization, automated CI/CD, and package management; I still have a lot to learn about concepts like unit testing or load balancing. More importantly, what I built checks every box I needed and lets me focus on building.