R Weekly Highlights

The way LLMs can be a little stubborn when interpreting data visualizations, bringing new meaning to digging for your data and learning along the way, and the latest addition to the futureverse that seems too good to be true, but it is real! Plus an amazing Shiny app tailored made for this very podcast.  Episode Links  This week's curator: Jonathan Kitt - @jonathankitt.bsky.social (Blues...

The inside story of how Claude Code with the proper scope provided a massive boost to drafting hundreds of pull requests, and debunking the myth on settling for compromises when prioritizing accessibility principles as demonstrated by a prominent leader in the visualization space. Plus we address candid feedback on last week's discussion on the tinyshinyserver package.  Episode Links  Th...

It's a new year of R Weekly Highlights! In this episode we learn of the positive intellectual diversity impacting R and Python communities, a great starting point to create your first RAG-powered knowledge store, and a new package enters the Shiny ecosystem that is certainly not tiny in its ambitions. Episode Links  This week's curator: Eric Nantz: @rpodcast@podcastindex.social (Mastodon) &am...

A retrospective that showcases favourite data visualisation projects and insights from 2025, a practical guide offering R package maintainers methods to gauge how their package is being used, and an R package release introducing additional helper functions that extend dplyr::mutate() for generating columns with useful rowwise and list-column operations.  Episode Links  This week's curato...

How the recent frontier LLM model releases compare for successfully generating R code, our take on the new Test Set data science podcast, and a surprising entry in the world of languages equipped for data science.  Episode Links  This week's curator: Sam Parmar - @parmsam@fosstodon.org (Mastodon) & @parmsam_ (X/Twitter) 2025-12-05 AI Newsletter The Test Set: Now on YouTube + a look a...

Prepare to deploy multiple LLM-powered agents for your next (secret) missions with mini007, a new contender to the high-performance linter tools with blazing performance that doesn't seem possible (but it is), and a usethis-like manager for your projects needing unified branding across deliverables.  Episode Links  This week's curator: Eric Nantz: @rpodcast@podcastindex.social (Mastodon)...

Creating your own race to a programming finish line with a hidden gem in mirai, the lowdown on using Generative AI for data visualization with more than a few surprises, and going from start to finish with a Shiny app created under the BDD mindset. Episode Links This week's curator: Sam Parmar - @parmsam@fosstodon.org (Mastodon) & @parmsam_ (X/Twitter) Aaaaand… they’re off! Generative AI for D...

The ducks have made their presence felt in the world of databases, but now you can take a dip in a new Ducklake all within R! If you ever felt someone should write a book on the many ways you can slidecraft Quarto presentations, we have good news for you. Lastly, a spectacular series on harnessing the power of LLMs in your Shiny apps concludes with a powerful and very relevant use case to help rev...

Fresh off an amazing experience at posit::conf(2025), the R Weekly Highlights podcast is back with episode 211! Eric and Mike share their experiences at the conference and then dive into an amazing collection of highlights. We learn about a myriad of packages to programmatically write and parse markdown documents, initial impressions with vibe-coding an R package to learn Japanese, and the immense...

In episode 210 of the R Weekly Highlights podcast: The Positron IDE has officially been released after two years of intense development, and we share what excites us the most. Plus a new tool in your Shiny testing toolbox to bridge the gap between server-side and dynamic updating the user interface, and an entry point to making that URL of your Shiny app set inputs on the fly, a topic one of your...

In episode 209 of R Weekly Highlights we learn ways you can pinpoint just what is slowing down your R code, a novel framing for testing your next plumber API, and the adventures in recreating a NY Times chart entirely with ggplot2. Episode Links This week's curator: Jon Carroll - @jonocarroll@fosstodon.org (Mastodon) & @jonocarroll.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy (Bluesky) & @carroll_jono (X/Twit...

In episode 208 of R Weekly Highlights, the LLM train keeps moving along in the data science community: First impressions of the new Positron Assistant for code completion and basic package development, plus a friendly app for exploring the upcoming posit::conf(2025) agenda created by one of our talented R Weekly curators! Episode Links This week's curator: Jon Calder - @jonmcalder@fosstodon.org (M...

It's been far too long since our last episode of R Weekly Highlights, but we are finally back with episode 207! In this episode we learn about novel ways to automate fancy Quarto content, how we can be on our best behavior with behavior-driven-development, and finding that pesky portion of data breaking long data pipelines with a magical debugging technique. Plus one of your hosts could not resist...

The summer schedule has been crazy, but we finally have a new episode of R Weekly Highlights! In this episode: How the new shiny2docker package eases your entry to the world of containers, the power of WebAssembly in full ggplot2 glory, and how the latest solution for speeding up R code draws upon a classic computing language you may not expect. Episode Links This week's curator: Eric Nantz: @rpod...

Have you wanted a chance to rewrite your own history? With Git, you certainly can! We learn that and other amazing tips to supercharge your version control skills. Plus a promising new package to let your Shiny app users make the call on their preferred layouts, and how mocking is not something to dread when you build unit tests interacting with external services. Episode Links This week's curator...

Episode 204 of R Weekly Highlights is jam-packed with four highlights! We discuss the recent improvements to the recipes package in the tidymodels suite, Nicola Rennie's adventures with this year's 30 day chart challenge, going back to math school with Jon Carroll's latest explorations in digit rotation, and our picks out of the excellent collection of the top 40 R packages for March. Episode Link...

In this episode of R Weekly Highlights we hear from industry experts on how they choose a programming language for their projects, a big boost to the use of copilot for building your next Shiny app, and the learning journey of a new R user. Episode Links This week's curator: Sam Parmar - @parmsam@fosstodon.org (Mastodon) & @parmsam_ (X/Twitter) Which programming language should I use? A guide...

It's not every day that we get to dive into a brand new release of R, but we get to do just that in episode 202! We share our takes on the major new features of R 4.5.0. We also preview the re-imagination of the engine powering R-based APIs, and the LLM-powered helper to get some of those R package development chores done. Episode Links This week's curator: Eric Nantz: @rpodcast@podcastindex.socia...

In this episode of R Weekly Highlights: We have a six-month follow-up perspective from an early Positron user, how the current landscape of AI tools perform when learning the ropes with the Tidyverse, and how you can create your first Observable plot while using R for data munging. Episode Links This week's curator: Jon Carroll - @jonocarroll@fosstodon.org (Mastodon) & @jonocarroll.fosstodon.o...

By some minor miracle (even on April Fools) the R Weekly Highlights podcast has made it to episode 200! We go "virtual" shopping for LLM-powered text analysis and prediction using the mall package, and how recent advancements in the grid and ggplot2 packages empower you to make use of highly-customized gradients. Plus listener feedback! Episode Links This week's curator: Jon Calder - @jonmcalder@f...

Thriving in a multi-lingual data science lifestyle while authoring your next Quarto project, putting LLMs to the scientific test with parsing manuscripts, and replicating a life-saving spatial visualization originally created over 170 years ago! Episode Links This week's curator: Ryo Nakagawara - @R_by_Ryo@mstdn.social (Mastodon) & @rbyryo.bsky.social (Bluesky) & @R_by_Ryo ) (X/Twitter) Cr...

Giving your package documentation site a little personality and much more with {pkgdown} customization, plus a novel new package to bring the power of LaTeX to all of your plots! Episode Links This week's curator: Batool Almarzouq - @batoolmm.bsky.social (Bluesky) & @batool664 (X/Twitter) Customize your expedition: Create a unique documentation for your R Package LaTeX Typesetting in R: The 'x...

A major milestone for leveraging LLMs in R just landed with the new ellmer package, along with a terrific showcase of retrieval-augmented generation combining ellmer and DuckDB. Plus an inspiring roundup of the recent Closeread contest winners. Episode Links This week's curator: Sam Parmar - @parmsam@fosstodon.org (Mastodon) & @parmsam_ (X/Twitter) Announcing ellmer: A package for interacting...

Our candid takes on the state of CRAN's role in light of recent package archival events, how creative use of LLMs could greatly streamline your next literature review, and a few great illustrations of lazy being a good thing in your R session. Episode Links This week's curator: Eric Nantz - @rpodcast@podcastindex.social (Mastodon) & @rpodcast.bsky.social (BlueSky) & @theRcast (X/Twitter) I...

An illuminating set of tips for making the best out of the phrase "fifty shades of grey" in your next monochrome visualisation, how the unique formatting features of the Scotland census data were tamed with the power of R, and how the first-ever native mobile application powered by R has opened the doors wide open for innovation across many parts of data science. Episode Links This week's curator:...