This week in R (2024-11-01)

Happy Friday everyone! Here's some news from the world of R this week:

• Conf Content: the materials from posit::conf(2024) have been released! Over 30 hours of recordings and workshops covering all manner of R-related topics. See the extensive list of content here!
• 'Ex'-social media: the last couple of weeks have seen many R users moving their social media presence to BlueSky (mainly from X). Since the demise of Twitter, R enthusiasts have been spread across many different platforms, but it looks like many are starting to concentrate on BlueSky - the Twitter-like interface is probably a factor. Jeremy Allen has also created a starter pack of the best R people to follow, which you can use to easily get started in the community.
• Awesome icons: Jon Harmon has developed a new package {favawesome} for easily adding font awesome icons as favicons in shiny and other HTML pages. If you're developing a shiny app this gives a nice easy way to make your app look a bit more professional and doesn't add any additional dependencies.
• CaRd games: Matt Dray has written a blog post explaining how he used the {sortable} R package to create a card game in shiny. An entertaining read from the man who has championed using R to create games ("R is a game engine. Fight me.") - I highly recommend you check it out!
• Chromote control: James Balamuta has recorded a video on scraping data from a dynamically generated website using the {chromote} package. This is a very useful tutorial for a common difficult task when trying to scrape data from the web.
• Pitching Positron: a new Positron website has appeared with some more information on what Positron is and who it is aimed at. Although it is still very early days and the site is minimal, it does give some background on the IDE and how to get started with it.
• Fun fact:?did you know, you can infinitely nest environments? Not that you would want to...but it does give some insight into how environments work.

my_env <- new.env()
my_env
<environment: 0x00000246c5e28480>

my_env$again <- my_env

my_env$again$again$again$again$again$again
<environment: 0x00000246c5e28480>
        

New versions:

• {duckdb} v1.1.2 - update to v1.1.2 of duckdb, a couple of new features and bug fixes
• {fs} v1.6.5 - some bug fixes to this package that featured in This week in R a couple of weeks ago!

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!