Happy Friday everyone! Here's some news from the world of R this week:
- Tricks and Treats:?as part of Hacktoberfest, Jonathan Carroll has created a repository aimed at helping R users get started with Github and open source by providing a {safespace} for them to try creating pull requests. If you've ever wanted to get started with Github or open source but weren't sure where to start, check out his blog post here.
- Monopoly skills: Etienne Bacher has written a blog post explaining property-based testing in R, using the {quickcheck} package. This kind of testing integrates seamlessly with {testthat} and is useful to know as an alternative way to approach unit tests!
- Hardcore Parquet!: Ted Laderas has published an introduction to using parquet and DuckDB to get blistering fast results on large datasets. I think this combination could well be the future of large dataset manipulation in R and Ted gives a good introduction, using quarto-live to include runnable chunks of R code!
- A Shiny future: Jasmine Daly has written up a forecast for what will be the biggest trends in Shiny development in 2025. I have to say I agree on the whole, particularly that we'll see more serverless apps with {shinylive} and more large data manipulation with {duckdb}.
- Covering all bases:?Posit have produced an article outlining the best way to connect to DuckDB, Snowflake or Databricks databases, in both R and Python. Very useful if you are using any of these DBMSs in an enterprise setting.
- Clean up the books: R-Consortium's latest Tidy Finance webinar is next Wednesday 9th October, and will cover evaluating performance with the Capital Asset Pricing Model in R. You can sign up to the webinar here.
- Fun fact:??did you know, base R has functionality for working with Roman numerals...
this_year <- as.roman(2024)
my_birth_year <- as.roman(1996)
my_age <- this_year - my_birth_year
my_age
#> [1] XXVIII
- vapour v0.0.6 - the latest release of the new 'typed superset of R' contains various bug fixes and features.
- {targets} v1.8.0 - several updates in this latest version of the hugely popular pipelines package.
I post updates like this every week so if you're interested feel free to follow. Comment below if there's something interesting you found out this week too!
