Happy Friday everyone! Here's some news from the world of R this week:
- Shiny gold medals: Posit have announced the winners of the 2024 Shiny Contest. Congratulations to the winners David & Maxime, their app submission 'Curbcut' is a very impressive, complex and complete shiny app - and a great example of everything that is possible with shiny. Congratulations to all the runners up (my favourite is 'Oh my bag!') and honourable mentions too!
- Calling out Quarto: James Balamuta has developed a new Quarto extension for adding custom callouts to your document. You can specify how the new callout type should look in your _quarto.yml file and then reuse them throughout your document! Currently only available for HTML outputs but definitely looks useful.
- Not R but still R: Jumping Rivers have released the first video from the London SatRdays meetup back in April. The first talk is from Andrie de Vries talking about project management in data science. Although Andrie himself says the talk is not about R, I've included it as it is a useful (perhaps underappreciated) topic that us R developers should be thinking about!
- Spaceships and rockets: ROpenSci have updated the documentation for the R-Universe API, and Ma?lle and Jeroen have also developed a new R package to simplify accessing it. The package isn't yet on CRAN but you can see it and install it from Github here. The package has functions for opting into to a universe and extracting data on packages.
- Get involved: ROpenSci have announced some new activities aimed at people wanting to make their first contribution to open source software! They will be organising a community call in January and a mini hackathon to help people get over the intimidation of their first contribution. They are currently looking for maintainers of ROpenSci packages to help get involved.
- Fun fact:?did you know, since R v4.0.0 you can specify raw strings in base R using the r"( notation? This can make it easier to use both single and double quotes in the same string.
r"(some string with 'single quotes' and "double quotes")"
#> [1] "some string with 'single quotes' and \"double quotes\""
- {duckdb} v1.1.1.9001 - (on R-universe, soon to be on CRAN) new feature to interrupt long-running queries in RStudio with Ctrl+C.
- {drat} 0.2.5 - some small updates to Dirk Eddelbuettel's package for managing local R package repositories.
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!
