R Weekly Highlights

Context is king in a trifecta of R packages harnessing LLMs to be your virtual assistant in package development and data science, plus the world (of data) is at your fingertips for data exploration and sharing your insights using the innovative closeread Quarto extension. Episode Links This week's curator: Jonathan Kitt - @jonathankitt.bsky.social (Bluesky) Three experiments in LLM code assist wit...

Ready to bring your next presentation slides to the world of Quarto? Our first highlight has a batch of power tips you can use for your next slide deck. Plus terrific insights from first-time contributors to open-source software. Episode Links This week's curator: Jon Calder - @jonmcalder@fosstodon.org (Mastodon) & @jonmcalder (X/Twitter) Seven tips for creating Quarto revealjs presentations F...

Bringing a little tidy magic to creating flowcharts in R, how data.table is addressing recent shifts in R's C APIs, and another showcase of R's visualization prowess in the realm of brain imaging.  Episode Links This week's curator: Ryo Nakagawara - @R_by_Ryo@mstdn.social (Mastodon) & @rbyryo.bsky.social (Bluesky) & @R_by_Ryo ) (X/Twitter) Flowcharts made easy with the package {flowch...

The R Weekly Highlights podcast returns for Our first episode of 2025! We learn how hosted and self-hostem LLM's perform in the summarization of Bluesky R posts, as well as how models hosted on Azure infrastructure summarize cycling destinations. Lastly, we visit the visualization corner once again to bring a little (or a lot) of color in your next graphics created with R. Episode Links This week'...

An evolution of asynchronous programming techniques to boost your Shiny apps, how a puzzle from over a century ago could tip the scales for mathematics algorithms solvable in R, and solving the recent 2024 Advent of Code puzzles with data.table. Episode Links This week's curator: Colin Fay - @colinfay@fosstodon.org [@_ColinFay]]( https://twitter.com/_ColinFay) (X/Twitter) @colinfay.bsky.social Par...

The future of R-Universe looks even brighter for 2025 and beyond, revisiting the key factors for possibly switching to the Positron IDE, and why there is more than meets the eyes when it comes to the potential of LLMs and AI (even in highly-regulated industries). Episode Links This week's curator: Eric Nantz - @rpodcast@podcastindex.social (Mastodon), @rpodcast.bsky.social (BlueSky), and @theRcast...

As the holiday season enters the picture, learn how a humble R package helps you to give thanks to the contributors of your open-source package. Plus a practical introduction to missing value interpolation with a tried-and-true R package with a rich history, and a comprehensive analysis to predict an NBA superstar's next shot result (who has made a lot of shots already in his career). Episode Link...

What a way to close out the month of November with this batch of highlights! The ultimate teaser for the first-ever native mobile Shiny application (and yes, it is real), how you can expand your network on Bluesky from the friendly confines of R, and the potential of the S7 object-oriented paradigm to streamline and validate function parameters. Plus late-breaking news on the integrations of Blues...

A summary of key contributions to the R language itself from R Dev Day at the Shiny in Production conference, and visualizing ice thickness in Greenland with the power of the tidyverse and leaflet. Episode Links This week's curator: Jon Calder - @jonmcalder@fosstodon.org (Mastodon) & @jonmcalder (X/Twitter) R Dev Day @ SIP 2024 Greenland ice thickness Entire issue available at rweekly.org/2024...

The innovations of the R community never cease to amaze us! How a programmatic approach to generating markdown was vital to a high-profile Quarto site, a novel infograph of Bob's Burgers sentiment analysis, and updates to the next evolution of object-oriented programming in R. Episode Links This week's curator: Ryo Nakagawara - @R_by_Ryo@mstdn.social (Mastodon) & @R_by_Ryo ) (X/Twitter) Guide...

Eric's flying solo this week, but the show goes on! The eagerly-anticipated recordings of the 2024 Posit conference are now available and Eric shares a few of his favorite gems, plus the Quarto publishing system takes center stage with how GitHub actions brings automation to report generation, and a terrific batch of answers to the recent R/Pharma workshop on building parameterized Quarto reports...

Bringing tidy principles to a fundamental visualization for gene expressions, being on your best "behavior" for organizing your tests, and how data.table stacks up to DuckDB and polars for reshaping your data layouts. Episode Links This week's curator: Jon Carroll - @jonocarroll@fosstodon.org (Mastodon) & @carroll_jono (X/Twitter) Exploring the tidyHeatmap R package Don't Expect That "Function...

A helpful way to organizing your growing collection of unit tests, how interfacing with LLMs just got easier in the R ecosystem, and a clever use of AI to summarize a large collection of blog posts. Episode Links This week's curator: Eric Nantz: @rpodcast@podcastindex.social (Mastodon) and @theRcast (X/Twitter) Nested unit tests with testthat shinychat: Chat UI component for Shiny for R Creating p...

A monumental achievement for bringing the Nix package manager to reproducible data science, travelling deep through the in-place modification rabbit hole across multiple languages, and a sampling of sage advice from the Data Science Hangout. Episode Links This week's curator: Tony Elhabr - @tonyelhabr@skrimmage.com (Mastodon) & @TonyElHabr (X/Twitter) Reproducible data science with Nix, part 1...

How the latest release of patchwork is saving a cozy space for gt tables, a new package in the ggplot2 ecosystem to lend a guide for your guides, and a prime way of using R to brute-force the answer to a mathematical brain-teaser. Episode Links This week's curator: Tony Elhabr - @tonyelhabr@skrimmage.com (Mastodon) & @TonyElHabr (X/Twitter) patchwork 1.3.0 {gguidance}: Extended guide options f...

Hide a picture of Homer Simpson in a residual plot of all places? Oh it's real, you could say "surreal!" Plus a data-driven approach to investigate recent changes to the Australian census, and a cautionary reminder to check just where those numbers are coming from the next time you build a prediction model. Plus the quest to make R the official language for the Coder Radio program reaps a new rewa...

How being fair to your research has a new and important meaning than what you may expect, the power you can unlock with custom roxygen tags, and a collection of tips you can apply today for your next visualization. Episode Links This week's curator: Batool Almarzouq - @batool664 (X/Twitter) Making your blog FAIR Create and use a custom roxygen2 tag Five ways to improve your chart axes Entire issue...

A peek behind the curtain of how R handles that batch of code you send to the console, an adventure in automating the translation of Quarto documents to multiple languages, and there's no time like the present to give your code a little linting love. Episode Links This week's curator: Sam Parmar - @parmsam@fosstodon.org (Mastodon) & @parmsam_ (X/Twitter) Long input lines Translating Quarto (an...

A few tools you can use to find those elusive bottlenecks in Shiny app performance, adding a dash of interactivity to a reactable table, and save yourself many hours of manual effort with Quarto parameterized reporting. Episode Links This week's curator: Colin Fay - @colinfay@fosstodon.org [@ ColinFay]]( https://twitter.com/ ColinFay) (X/Twitter) Unveiling Bottlenecks (Part 2): A Deep Dive into Pr...

Eric flies solo for this episode with a recap of his positconf 2024 adventures! Also how not to panic when you see a merge conflict in Git, the genesis of the new R ARUG community in India, and a great primer on creating your own Quarto templates. Episode Links This week's curator: Eric Nantz: @rpodcast@podcastindex.social (Mastodon) and @theRcast (X/Twitter) Please let me merge before I start cry...

A realistic take on converting the NY Forest Carbon Assessment modeling pipeline to the tidymodels suite, and a review of R package development workflows in the Positron IDE. Episode Links This week's curator: Jon Calder - @jonmcalder@fosstodon.org (Mastodon) & @jonmcalder (X/Twitter) Converting New York’s Forest Carbon Assessment to Tidymodels R package development in Positron Entire issue av...

Episode Links This week's curator: Jon Calder - @jonmcalder@fosstodon.org (Mastodon) & @jonmcalder (X/Twitter) Let's Talk About the Weather 2024 Shiny Contest Entire issue available at rweekly.org/2024-W31 Supplement Resources https://lorenzwalthert.github.io/precommit/index.html https://www.kenkoonwong.com/blog/llm-rag/ Supporting the show Use the contact page at https://serve.podhome.fm/cust...

Creating retro-gaming sprites rendered from the comforts of R? Yes we can! Plus an honest take on the utility of Github's Copilot Workspace in the context of package development, and taking the concept of code trees to another level with treesitter. Episode Links This week's curator: Ryo Nakagawara - @R by Ryo@mstdn.social (Mastodon) & @R by Ryo ) (X/Twitter) Tile-style sprite delight Some tho...

The world of web-assembly in R continues to move fast with key updates to the webrcli & spidyr packages, and what has us excited about the mapgl package for producing amazing spatial visualizations.  Episode Links This week's curator: Batool Almarzouq - @batool664 (X/Twitter) webrcli & spidyr: What’s new Create a Compare slider widget Entire issue available at rweekly.org/2024-W28 Sup...

The latest updates to the rayverse bring new meaning to smoothing out the rough edges of your next 3-D visualization, the momentum of DuckDB continues with the MotherDuck data warehouse, and the role nanoparquet plays to bring the benefits of parquet to small data sets. Episode Links This week's curator: Eric Nantz: @rpodcast@podcastindex.social (Mastodon) and @theRcast (X/Twitter) Sculpting the M...