CROPLAND's rstudio conf 2022 headlines

rstudio::conf(2022), the single largest data science event in the world, is already a couple of weeks past us. Since this year’s edition cut right into our holidays, none of our team members were able to join the conference. Nevertheless, CROPLAND was there in spirit (and as a sponsor)! While nothing can make up for a nice get-together with like-minded people (did someone say fellow data-dorks?), the good folks at Posit PBC have been so kind to make the recordings of the presentations available on their website.

So, data scientist Jeroen had the pleasure of skimming through two days’ worth of videos for you and wanted to share his headlines of the conference, as well as a list of talks he found the most inspiring (which was a hard pick, by the way!).

Rebranding RStudio

Of course, THE big announcement was the rebranding of RStudio into“Posit”. Their new name is an effort to underscore that the company wants to offer the best support to open-source data science practitioners, regardless of whether they are using R, Python or any future language that may emerge as the new kid on the block. I’m still rooting for Julia, but, then again, who am I?

Release Quarto

This announcement immediately set the stage against which the other headlines at this year’s conf are set. The release of Quarto, for instance, was another major topic at the conference. Quarto is a new open-source technical reporting system with support for both R and Python. In this sense, it can be seen as a follow-up to rmarkdown, which is an R package used to generate documents, websites, books, presentations which embed, e.g., code-generated visualizations.?

The beauty of the system is that the text and the code that generates the visualizations live side-by-side in a single document that can be exported to different formats (e.g., a PowerPoint presentation and a Word document handout). What’s new in Quarto is the fact that it is a standalone solution, which supports Python in addition to R, which has an improved visual editor and better support for working with citations. For more information, be sure to check out https://quarto.org/.

Python Shiny

But probably the most exciting announcement was made by Joe Cheng, Posit’s CTO and the creator of Shiny, in his keynote The Past and Future of Shiny. You may have guessed already, Shiny has now officially been ported to Python! Yes, you read that right; there’s now a Python Shiny too!. Of course, as with similar initiatives that were presented at earlier conferences, much will depend on how much traction Python Shiny can generate among “monolingual” pyheads. Remember siuba, the port of the tidyverse to Python? Great initiative, objectively better interface than “basic” pandas and matplotlib, but it remains fairly unknown in Python midst. And as a result, it more or less sits there idle. Only time will tell Python Shiny’s ultimate fate.

CROPLAND also kept an eye open for presentations that related to our areas of expertise: Shiny app development, A.I. and data platform development. Make sure to check out our top picks!