R Weekly Highlights

A set of principles to enhance testing APIs created inside R, and the engine behind automatic reloading of rendered Shiny apps becomes available for new use cases. Episode Links  This week's curator: Jon Calder - @jonmcalder@fosstodon.org (Mastodon) & @jonmcalder (X/Twitter) Testing Your Plumber APIs from R watcher 0.2.0: filesystem watching for R, and the engine behind Shiny auto-reload...

The R Core team receives a prestigious award in the world of Statistics, a month-long recognition of the rOpenSci package maintainers, and a collection of helpful tips for obtaining robust R code from AI agents.  Episode Links  This week's curator: Eric Nantz: @rpodcast@podcastindex.social (Mastodon) & @rpodcast.bsky.social (BlueSky) & @theRcast (X/Twitter) 2026 Rousseeuw Prize f...

The evolution of Posit's data science agents, robust approaches to unnamed parameters in R functions, and the power of math and visualization collide in an unexpected way. Episode Links  This week's curator: Sam Parmar - @parmsam@fosstodon.org (Mastodon) & @parmsam_ (X/Twitter) A brief and biased history of Posit data science agents Three small dots for more readable code Little useless-u...

A friendly reminder on checking customization when upgrading R, how refactoring may not be so tedious when using the Jarl utility, and honest takes on various code smells you can prevent in your next testing suite.  Episode Links  This week's curator: Batool Almarzouq - @batoolmm.bsky.social (Bluesky) & @batool664 (X/Twitter) The Lurking Dangers of the R Version Update Refactoring wi...

R is capable of many analyes in the world of data science, but can it build a computer? Also a massive usability feature landing in the latest bslib to power up your cards, and optimizing memory usage with the latest rleases of mirai and mori.  Episode Links  This week's curator: Jonathan Kitt - @jonathankitt.bsky.social (Bluesky) Building a Computer in R Introducing Toolbars: Supercharg...

The power of choice is in full effect! How you can leverage GitLab to publish your next Quarto document online, how to bring key R functional paradigms to a Python session, and adding a larger safety net with your unit tests with {mutagen} 0.2.0.  Episode Links  This week's curator: Jon Carroll - @jonocarroll@fosstodon.org (Mastodon) & @jonocarroll.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy (Bluesky)...

Applying novel statistical and visualization techniques to predict war duration, why there is more than meets the statistical eye behind a classical model benchmarking statistic, and celebrating a major milestone for pioneers in open science with R.  Episode Links  This week's curator: Colin Fay - @colinfay@fosstodon.org (Mastodon) & @colinfay.bsky.social (Bluesky) & [@_ColinFay]...

A massive milestone for the language that eventually led to the R we know and love, plus a comprehensive look at two popular workflow frameworks across the R and Python ecosystems.   Episode Links  This week's curator: Jon Calder - @jonmcalder@fosstodon.org (Mastodon) & @jonmcalder (X/Twitter) S at 50 Comparing R's {targets} and dbt for Data Engineering Entire issue available at rwee...

If Shiny wasn't awesome enough, a new toolkit is bringing the awesome to new heights! Plus a handful of ggplot2 functions that can immediate impact common visualization operations, and knitr gains support for a much-hyped typesetting format for the static document crowd.  Episode Links  This week's curator: Eric Nantz: @rpodcast@podcastindex.social (Mastodon) & @rpodcast.bsky.social...

How the new logrittr package gives you a peek behind the tidy pipelines of dplyr, and a fascinating glimpse into the universe of seeds going far beyond a favorite 80's song.  Episode Links  This week's curator: Jonathan Kitt - @jonathankitt.bsky.social (Bluesky) logrittr: A Verbose Pipe Operator for Logging dplyr Pipelines Generating universes within universes with a single seed Working...

After an unexpected break we are back with a new episode of R Weekly Highlights! If you thought the easiest way to create pivot tables was in Excel, the a new package just might change your perspective. Plus how you can pull the strings for a multi-agent LLM workflow with the new puppeteeR package. Episode Links  This week's curator: Batool Almarzouq - @batoolmm.bsky.social (Bluesky) & @b...

Choice is good, but sometimes you may want a little help! Our first two highlights showcase approaches you can take to inform your next LLM for analyses and open-source license. Plus how to make your mark(s) within your version control history.  Episode Links  This week's curator: Sam Parmar - @parmsam@fosstodon.org (Mastodon) & @parmsam_ (X/Twitter) How to choose the best LLM using...

A glimpse into the R Consortium Submissions Working Group's recent successes and future work, and a new way to view those nested lists from a familiar face making his return to blogging!  Episode Links  This week's curator: Batool Almarzouq - @batoolmm.bsky.social (Bluesky) & @batool664 (X/Twitter) Submissions Working Group: 2026 Plans and 2025 Success Viewing Nested Lists with xfun:...

A prominent leader at the intersection of data science and data engineering across multiple languages shares her insights, how a recent Git workshop tailored for data science de-mystifies common pitfalls, and for the second straight episode a new transpiler bringing dplyr syntax to databases (quite literally).  Episode Links  This week's curator: Jon Carroll - @jonocarroll@fosstodon.org...

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...