R Weekly Highlights

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:...

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...