Update, March 2026: The talk is now live on YouTube! Watch it here.
Way back in February of 2018 I asked “where is the love for htmlwidgets?” and wished there was a hex sticker for the package. Seven years later, I designed one:
Getting an audience for htmlwidgets (and the hex sticker)
I had the joy of giving a joint talk with the amazing Nic Crane at the Shiny in Production 2025 conference with a slightly absurd title:
htmlwidgets Are a Secret Sauce in R – Can LLMs Make Them the Perfect Condiment?
The confusing thing about htmlwidgets is that packages like plotly and leaflet are used by huge numbers of R users, but the vast majority don’t realise they’re built on htmlwidgets. If you think plotly is magic rather than one of 130+ registered htmlwidgets packages, you’ll never discover the full universe of interactive visualisation available to you. So how do we communicate the power of htmlwidgets within the R community? It’s hex stickers!
While writing the talk, Nic and I had been corresponding with Carson Sievert about a hex sticker design and we’d settled on the package factory concept. We hoped to get it merged before the conference, but we hadn’t — so it was wonderful when, in the Q&A, some of Carson’s friends in the audience told us the sticker had just been officially merged.