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 frontier LLMs with R/Tidyverse.
• Harnessing Azure OpenAI and R for Web Content Summarisation: A Practical Guide with rvest and tidyverse
• Working with colours in R
• Entire issue available at rweekly.org/2025-W01

Supplement Resources

• Rasa open-source documentation https://rasa.com/docs/rasa/
• Brand.yml https://posit-dev.github.io/brand-yml/
• {rix} updates https://docs.ropensci.org/rix/news/index.html
• Strategic Investment Analysis: Key Questions Generated by DoTadda’s Knowledge Platform https://www.spsanderson.com/steveondata/posts/2024-12-26/

Supporting the show

• Use the contact page at https://serve.podhome.fm/custompage/r-weekly-highlights/contact to send us your feedback
• R-Weekly Highlights on the Podcastindex.org - You can send a boost into the show directly in the Podcast Index. First, top-up with Alby, and then head over to the R-Weekly Highlights podcast entry on the index.
• A new way to think about value: https://value4value.info
• Get in touch with us on social media
  • Eric Nantz: @[email protected] (Mastodon), @rpodcast.bsky.social (BlueSky) and @theRcast (X/Twitter)
  • Mike Thomas: @[email protected] (Mastodon), @mike-thomas.bsky.social (BlueSky), and @mike_ketchbrook (X/Twitter) 

Music powered by OCRemix

• Peacemaker - Sonic Adventure - halc - https://ocremix.org/remix/OCR02187
• The Quick and the Blue - Mega Man 2 - The Megas - https://ocremix.org/remix/OCR02090

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 - @[email protected] [@_ColinFay]](https://twitter.com/_ColinFay) (X/Twitter) @colinfay.bsky.social
• Parallel and Asynchronous Programming in Shiny with future, promise, future_promise, and ExtendedTask
• Writing Signed Trinary: or, Back To the Four Weights Problem
• Advent of Code with data.table: Week One
• Entire issue available at rweekly.org/2024-W51

Supplement Resources

• Futureverse - A Unifying Parallelization Framework in R for Everyone https://www.futureverse.org/
• Non-blocking operations with ExtendedTask https://shiny.posit.co/r/articles/improve/nonblocking/
• Asynchronous Shiny apps with crew and mirai https://wlandau.github.io/crew/articles/shiny.html
• Bachet’s Four Weights Problem https://rworks.dev/posts/four-weights/
• Advent of Code 2024 https://adventofcode.com/
• Lime Bikes Summary Dashboard https://jokasan.github.io/Lime_Dash/

Chapter image credits

• Advent of Code https://thenewstack.io/advent-of-codes-programming-puzzles-set-new-global-record/

Supporting the show

• Use the contact page at https://serve.podhome.fm/custompage/r-weekly-highlights/contact to send us your feedback
• R-Weekly Highlights on the Podcastindex.org - You can send a boost into the show directly in the Podcast Index. First, top-up with Alby, and then head over to the R-Weekly Highlights podcast entry on the index.
• A new way to think about value: https://value4value.info
• Get in touch with us on social media
  • Eric Nantz: @[email protected] (Mastodon), @rpodcast.bsky.social (BlueSky) and @theRcast (X/Twitter)
  • Mike Thomas: @[email protected] (Mastodon), @mike-thomas.bsky.social (BlueSky), and @mike_ketchbrook (X/Twitter) 

Music credits powered by OCRemix

• J-Type - Tetris - Nostalvania - https://ocremix.org/remix/OCR04401
• I Just Skipped Time Yesterday - Puyo Puyo - Rexy - https://ocremix.org/remix/OCR03941

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 - @[email protected] (Mastodon), @rpodcast.bsky.social (BlueSky), and @theRcast (X/Twitter)
• R-Universe Named R Consortium’s Newest Top Level Project
• Positron vs RStudio - is it time to switch?
• Summer is Coming: AI for Shiny, R, and Pharma
• Entire issue available at rweekly.org/2024-W50

Supplement Resources

• rOpenSci Blog Post https://ropensci.org/blog/2024/12/03/r-universe-r-consortium-tlp/
• Positron IDE - A new IDE for data science https://drmowinckels.io/blog/2024/positron/
• Fun with Positron https://www.andrewheiss.com/blog/2024/07/08/fun-with-positron/
• Open VSX Registry https://open-vsx.org
• Power Mode Extension https://open-vsx.org/extension/hoovercj/vscode-power-mode
• Joe Cheng's slides from R/Pharma keybote https://jcheng5.github.io/pharma-ai-2024/#/title-slide
• R Consortium Submissions Pilot 2 Shiny Application https://github.com/RConsortium/submissions-pilot2
• Daniel Sebanes Bove & Joe Cheng - Discussion of R/Pharma Keynote https://youtu.be/AU1MmcXYnJ0?si=A3V9JHYdZLiz-lvv
• Practical Tips for Using Generative AI in Data Science Workflows https://youtu.be/rPeOdc8jTSE?si=APtIhpRqlh2I_Ek1
• Apple Music Wrapped in R https://www.andrewheiss.com/blog/2024/12/04/apple-music-wrapped-r/
• Predicting Best Picture at the 2025 Academy Awards https://www.markhw.com/blog/oscars2025
• Navidrome - Your Personal Streaming Service https://www.navidrome.org/
• Scrubbing your music with Maloja https://wenkdth.org/posts/maloja-scrobbling/

Supporting the show

• Use the contact page at https://serve.podhome.fm/custompage/r-weekly-highlights/contact to send us your feedback
• R-Weekly Highlights on the Podcastindex.org - You can send a boost into the show directly in the Podcast Index. First, top-up with Alby, and then head over to the R-Weekly Highlights podcast entry on the index.
• A new way to think about value: https://value4value.info
• Get in touch with us on social media
  • Eric Nantz: @[email protected] (Mastodon), @rpodcast.bsky.social (BlueSky) and @theRcast (X/Twitter)
  • Mike Thomas: @[email protected] (Mastodon), @mike-thomas.bsky.social (BlueSky), and @mike_ketchbrook (X/Twitter) 

Music credits powered by OCRemix

• The Traveling Band's Last Song - Wild Arms: Armed and Dangerous - Artem Bank - https://ocremix.org/remix/OCR02588
• Secrets Abound - Final Fantasy - Midgarian Sky - https://ocremix.org/remix/OCR02452

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 - @[email protected] (Mastodon) & @carroll_jono (X/Twitter)
• Give Thanks with the allcontributors Package
• How to Interpolate Missing Values in R: A Step-by-Sthttps://github.com/ropensci/allcontributors/?tab=readme-ov-file#contributorsep Guide with Examples
• Predicting NBA Score Plays - Steph Curry Shots
• Entire issue available at rweekly.org/2024-W49

Supplement Resources

• allcontributors - Acknowledge all contributors to a project https://docs.ropensci.org/allcontributors/
• Contributor section of {allcontributors} README https://github.com/ropensci/allcontributors/?tab=readme-ov-file#contributors
• zoo - S3 Infrastructure for Regular and Irregular Time Series https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/zoo/index.html
• mice - Multivariate Imputation by Chained Equations https://amices.org/mice/
• naniar - Data structures, summaries, and visualization for missing data http://naniar.njtierney.com/
• hoopR - Data and tools for men's basketball https://hoopr.sportsdataverse.org/
• BasketballAnalyzeR - Analysis and Visualization of Basketball Data https://github.com/sndmrc/BasketballAnalyzeR/tree/master
• Optimizing R/Shiny App Performance with Advanced Caching Techniques https://www.appsilon.com/post/r-shiny-caching-techniques

Supporting the show

• Use the contact page at https://serve.podhome.fm/custompage/r-weekly-highlights/contact to send us your feedback
• R-Weekly Highlights on the Podcastindex.org - You can send a boost into the show directly in the Podcast Index. First, top-up with Alby, and then head over to the R-Weekly Highlights podcast entry on the index.
• A new way to think about value: https://value4value.info
• Get in touch with us on social media
  • Eric Nantz: @[email protected] (Mastodon), @rpodcast.bsky.social (BlueSky) and @theRcast (X/Twitter)
  • Mike Thomas: @[email protected] (Mastodon), @mike-thomas.bsky.social (BlueSky), and @mike_ketchbrook (X/Twitter) 

Music credits powered by OCRemix

• Diddy Kong Luau Party - Diddy Kong Racing - Guifrog - https://ocremix.org/remix/OCR02794
• From Downtown - NBA Jam - ktriton, Mustin, Steve Lella - https://ocremix.org/remix/OCR02111

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 - @[email protected] (Mastodon) & @TonyElHabr (X/Twitter)
• You’ve Been Waiting for Native Mobile Apps with R? The Wait Is Over.
• Expand your Bluesky network with R and the atrrr package
• S7 & Options objects - reimagining readr::read_csv()
• Entire issue available at rweekly.org/2024-W48

Supplement Resources

• Obtainium: Get Android apps straight from the source https://github.com/ImranR98/Obtainium
• F-Droid: Free and open-source Android app repository https://f-droid.org/en/
• {atttr} Wrapper for the AT protocol behind Bluesky https://jbgruber.github.io/atrrr/
• Bluesky network analyzer https://bsky-follow-finder.theo.io
• Bluesky comments extension (James Blastula) https://quarto.thecoatlessprofessor.com/bluesky-comments/
• Bluesky comments for Quarto (Garrick Aiden-Buie) https://pkg.garrickadenbuie.com/quarto-bluesky-comments/
• Classes and objects (S7 documentation) https://rconsortium.github.io/S7/articles/classes-objects.html
• {roxy.shinylive} A roxygen2 extension for Shinylive https://insightsengineering.github.io/roxy.shinylive/main/
• Introducing WebR to TLG Catalog (Pawel's talk from R/Pharma 2024) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vaoDUrUscZA
• Spotify Wrapped: R and ggplot2 Edition https://rpubs.com/colebaril/spotify-wrapped
• Navidrome: Your personal music streaming service https://www.navidrome.org/
• Tailscale https://tailscale.com/

Supporting the show

• Use the contact page at https://serve.podhome.fm/custompage/r-weekly-highlights/contact to send us your feedback
• R-Weekly Highlights on the Podcastindex.org - You can send a boost into the show directly in the Podcast Index. First, top-up with Alby, and then head over to the R-Weekly Highlights podcast entry on the index.
• A new way to think about value: https://value4value.info
• Get in touch with us on social media
  • Eric Nantz: @[email protected] (Mastodon), @rpodcast.bsky.social (BlueSky) and @theRcast (X/Twitter)
  • Mike Thomas: @[email protected] (Mastodon), @mike-thomas.bsky.social (BlueSky), and @mike_ketchbrook (X/Twitter) 

Music credits powered by OCRemix

• Cammy's London Drizzle - Super Street Fighter II - MkVaff - https://sf2.ocremix.org/
• Voodoo, Roots 'n Grog - Secret of Monkey Island - Diggi Dis feat. Alex Jones - https://ocremix.org/remix/OCR02180

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 - @[email protected] (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-group
• R Translations Status Dashboard https://contributor.r-project.org/translations-dashboard/
• R Development Guide https://contributor.r-project.org/rdevguide/
• Connect local Positron IDE to Gitpod via SSH? https://github.com/r-devel/r-dev-env/issues/193#issuecomment-2383816303

Supporting the show

• Use the contact page at https://serve.podhome.fm/custompage/r-weekly-highlights/contact to send us your feedback
• R-Weekly Highlights on the Podcastindex.org - You can send a boost into the show directly in the Podcast Index. First, top-up with Alby, and then head over to the R-Weekly Highlights podcast entry on the index.
• A new way to think about value: https://value4value.info
• Get in touch with us on social media
  • Eric Nantz: @[email protected] (Mastodon), @rpodcast.bsky.social (BlueSky) and @theRcast (X/Twitter)
  • Mike Thomas: @[email protected] (Mastodon), @mike-thomas.bsky.social (BlueSky), and @mike_ketchbrook (X/Twitter) 

Music credits powered by OCRemix

• Ice Cap Zone (Pulse Mix) - Sonic the Hedgehog 3 - MkVaff - https://ocremix.org/remix/OCR04400

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 - @[email protected] (Mastodon) & @R_by_Ryo) (X/Twitter)
• Guide to generating and rendering computational markdown content programmatically with Quarto
• Bob’s Burgers Episode Fingerprints by Season
• S7 0.2.0
• Entire issue available at rweekly.org/2024-W46

Supporting the show

• Use the contact page at https://serve.podhome.fm/custompage/r-weekly-highlights/contact to send us your feedback
• R-Weekly Highlights on the Podcastindex.org - You can send a boost into the show directly in the Podcast Index. First, top-up with Alby, and then head over to the R-Weekly Highlights podcast entry on the index.
• A new way to think about value: https://value4value.info
• Get in touch with us on social media
  • Eric Nantz: @[email protected] (Mastodon) and @theRcast (X/Twitter)
  • Mike Thomas: @mike-thomas.bsky.social & @[email protected] (Mastodon) & @mike_ketchbrook (X/Twitter) 

Music credits powered by OCRemix

• Cammy's London Drizzle - Super Street Fighter II: The New Challengers - MkVaff - https://ocremix.org/remix/OCR00453
• Bar Hopping - Streets of Rage 2 - jaxx - https://ocremix.org/remix/OCR00437

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 and workshop materials from posit::conf(2024)
• 3MW (Automate Anything With R & GitHub Actions)
• Parameterized plots and reports with R and Quarto
• Entire issue available at rweekly.org/2024-W45

Supplement Resources

• Eric's recap of the Posit conference experience in episode 174 https://serve.podhome.fm/episodepage/r-weekly-highlights/174
• Eric's talk on web-assembly for shiny-based clinical submissions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iC78WbnwnIs
• Introducing Positron https://youtu.be/8uRcB34Hhsw
• We CAN have nice Shiny apps: What's new in Shiny's UI & UX (Greg Swinehart) https://youtu.be/FPc5PJRWHsk
• Closeread: Bringing Scrollytelling to Quarto (Andrew Bray) https://youtu.be/KqLxy66B3lQ
• Closeread Posit Contest https://posit.co/blog/closeread-prize-announcement/
• Collection of Quarto GitHub Actions https://github.com/quarto-dev/quarto-actions
• Data Wrangling for Python or R Like a Boss With DuckDB https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GELhdezYmP0
• Eric's advanced use of GitHub actions for the R Pilot Submissions web-assembly app infrastructure: https://github.com/RConsortium/submissions-pilot4-webR
• Nicola Rennie's R/Pharma workshop materials for parameterized reports with R and Quarto https://nrennie.rbind.io/r-pharma-2024-parameterized-reports/
• The Ultimate Guide to Creating Lists in R: From Basics to Advanced Examples https://www.spsanderson.com/steveondata/posts/2024-10-29/

Supporting the show

• Use the contact page at https://serve.podhome.fm/custompage/r-weekly-highlights/contact to send us your feedback
• R-Weekly Highlights on the Podcastindex.org - You can send a boost into the show directly in the Podcast Index. First, top-up with Alby, and then head over to the R-Weekly Highlights podcast entry on the index.
• A new way to think about value: https://value4value.info
• Get in touch with us on social media
  • Eric Nantz: @[email protected] (Mastodon) and @theRcast (X/Twitter)
  • Mike Thomas: @[email protected] (Mastodon) and @mike_ketchbrook (X/Twitter) 

Music credits powered by OCRemix

• Divinity - The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past - Nostalvania - https://ocremix.org/remix/OCR03442
• Smoke & Marbles - Castlevania: Symphony of the Night - Emunator, ZackParrish, Lucas Guimaraes - https://ocremix.org/remix/OCR04714

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 - @[email protected] (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 available at rweekly.org/2024-W43

Supplement Resources

• tidyHeatmap: Draw heatmap simply using a tidy data frame https://stemangiola.github.io/tidyHeatmap/
• Novel App knock-in mouse model shows key features of amyloid pathology and reveals profound metabolic dysregulation of microglia https://molecularneurodegeneration.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13024-022-00547-7
• Shiny App-Packages chapter on writing tests and specifications https://mjfrigaard.github.io/shiny-app-pkgs/test_specs.html
• WANT CLEANER UNIT TESTS? TRY ARRANGE, ACT, ASSERT COMMENTS https://jakubsob.github.io/blog/want-cleaner-test-try-arrange-act-assert/
• Super Data Science Podcast 827: Polars: Past, Present and Future, with Polars Creator Ritchie Vink https://www.superdatascience.com/podcast/827
• duckplyr: A DuckDB-backed version for dplyr https://duckplyr.tidyverse.org/

Supporting the show

• Use the contact page at https://serve.podhome.fm/custompage/r-weekly-highlights/contact to send us your feedback
• R-Weekly Highlights on the Podcastindex.org - You can send a boost into the show directly in the Podcast Index. First, top-up with Alby, and then head over to the R-Weekly Highlights podcast entry on the index.
• A new way to think about value: https://value4value.info
• Get in touch with us on social media
  • Eric Nantz: @[email protected] (Mastodon) and @theRcast (X/Twitter)
  • Mike Thomas: @[email protected] (Mastodon) and @mike_ketchbrook (X/Twitter) 

Music credits powered by OCRemix

• Black Feathers in the Sky - Kid Icarus: Uprising - MkVaff - https://ocremix.org/remix/OCR04200
• Cross-Examination - Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - PrototypeRaptor - https://ocremix.org/remix/OCR01846

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: @[email protected] (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 Resources

• elmer: Call LLM APIs from R https://hadley.github.io/elmer/
• Joe Cheng's sidebot app (R edition) https://github.com/jcheng5/r-sidebot
• EDA Reimagined in R: GWalkR + DuckDB for Lightning-Fast Visualizations https://medium.com/@bruceyu0416/eda-reimagined-in-r-gwalkr-duckdb-for-lightning-fast-visualizations-05b011e8ae39
• Apache superset https://superset.apache.org/
• Postprocessing is coming to tidymodels https://www.tidyverse.org/blog/2024/10/postprocessing-preview/

Supporting the show

• Use the contact page at https://serve.podhome.fm/custompage/r-weekly-highlights/contact to send us your feedback
• R-Weekly Highlights on the Podcastindex.org - You can send a boost into the show directly in the Podcast Index. First, top-up with Alby, and then head over to the R-Weekly Highlights podcast entry on the index.
• A new way to think about value: https://value4value.info
• Get in touch with us on social media
  • Eric Nantz: @[email protected] (Mastodon) and @theRcast (X/Twitter)
  • Mike Thomas: @[email protected] (Mastodon) and @mike_ketchbrook (X/Twitter) 

Music credits powered by OCRemix

• Pachelbel's Ganon - The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time - djpretzel - https://ocremix.org/remix/OCR00753
• Voodoo, Roots 'n Grog - The Secret of Monkey Island - Alex Jones, Diggi Dis - https://ocremix.org/remix/OCR02180