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: @rpodcast@podcastindex.social (Mastodon) & @rpodcast.bsky.social (BlueSky) & @theRcast (X/Twitter...
Jun 13, 2025•42 min•Ep. 206
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: Jon Calder - @jonmcalder@fosstodon.org (Mastodon) & @jonmcalder (X/Twitter) Hack your way to a...
May 23, 2025•53 min•Ep. 205
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 Links This week's curator: Batool Almarzouq - @batoolmm.bsky.social (Bluesky) & @batool664 (X/Twitte...
May 07, 2025•42 min•Ep. 204
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 for early-career researchers Reliable Shiny Code with Copilot and Posit’s VS Code Extension My Journ...
May 02, 2025•44 min•Ep. 203
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.social (Mastodon) & @rpodcast.bsky.social (BlueSky) & @theRcast (X/Twitter) What's new in R 4.5.0...
Apr 16, 2025•42 min•Ep. 202
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.org.ap.brid.gy (Bluesky) & @carroll_jono (X/Twitter) Positron: current joys and pains Learning th...
Apr 09, 2025•52 min•Ep. 201
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@fosstodon.org (Mastodon) & @jonmcalder (X/Twitter) Text Summarization, Translation, and Classific...
Apr 02, 2025•39 min•Ep. 200
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) Creating multilingual documentation with Quarto The ellmer package for using LLMs with R is a game cha...
Mar 19, 2025•39 min•Ep. 199
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 'xdvir' Package Entire issue available at rweekly.org/2025-W11 Supplement Resources {xdvir} package vi...
Mar 12, 2025•42 min•Ep. 198
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 with Large Language Models in R Rapid RAG Prototyping: Building a Retrieval Augmented Generation Pro...
Mar 07, 2025•42 min•Ep. 197
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) Is CRAN Holding R Back? How to use large language models to assist in systematic literature reviews L...
Feb 21, 2025•52 min•Ep. 196
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: Jon Carroll - @jonocarroll@fosstodon.org (Mastodon) & @jonocarroll.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy (Bl...
Feb 14, 2025•54 min•Ep. 195
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 with RStudio and Positron Gapminder: how has the world changed? Downloading datasets from Our World in ...
Feb 05, 2025•47 min•Ep. 194
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 From Novice to Contributor: Making and Supporting First-Time Contributions to FOSS Entire issue avail...
Jan 29, 2025•34 min•Ep. 193
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 {flowchart} Use of non-API entry points in data.table Intro to working with volume and surface brain data Entire ...
Jan 22, 2025•51 min•Ep. 192
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's curator: Batool Almarzouq - @batool664 (X/Twitter) Bluesky conversation analysis with local and fr...
Jan 15, 2025•48 min•Ep. 191
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 Parallel and Asynchronous Programming in Shiny with future, promise, future_promise, and ExtendedTask W...
Dec 18, 2024•40 min•Ep. 190
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 (X/Twitter) R-Universe Named R Consortium’s Newest Top Level Project Positron vs RStudio - is it ti...
Dec 11, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 189
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 Links This week's curator: Jon Carroll - @jonocarroll@fosstodon.org (Mastodon) & @carroll_jono (X/Tw...
Dec 04, 2024•44 min•Ep. 188
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 Bluesky and Quarto! Episode Links This week's curator: Tony Elhabr - @tonyelhabr@skrimmage.com (Mastodon)...
Nov 27, 2024•48 min•Ep. 187
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-W47 Supplement Resources R Contribution Working Group https://contributor.r-project.org/working-gro...
Nov 21, 2024•28 min•Ep. 186
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 to generating and rendering computational markdown content programmatically with Quarto Bob’s Burger...
Nov 15, 2024•50 min•Ep. 185
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 in R. Episode Links This week's curator: Batool Almarzouq - @batool664 (X/Twitter) Talk recordings a...
Nov 06, 2024•43 min•Ep. 184
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 Works Correctly", Do This Instead Comparing data.table reshape to duckdb and polars Entire issue av...
Oct 23, 2024•50 min•Ep. 183
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 post summary with AI from Hugging Face Entire issue available at rweekly.org/2024-W42 Supplement Reso...
Oct 16, 2024•53 min•Ep. 182
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 13 -- {rix} is on CRAN! In-Place Modifications Data Career Insights: Lessons from four senior leaders...
Oct 02, 2024•52 min•Ep. 181
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 for 'ggplot2' Prime numbers as sums of three squares. by @ellis2013nz Entire issue available at rweek...
Sep 25, 2024•43 min•Ep. 180
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 reward! Episode Links This week's curator: Ryo Nakagawara - @R by Ryo@mstdn.social (Mastodon) & @R b...
Sep 18, 2024•40 min•Ep. 179
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 available at rweekly.org/2024-W37 Supplement Resources httr2: Perform HTTP requests and process the...
Sep 11, 2024•49 min•Ep. 178
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 (and other markdown files) into Any Language Get your codebase lint-free forever with lintr Entire issu...
Sep 04, 2024•45 min•Ep. 177
