2020 at RStudio: A Year in Review

^{Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash}

We at RStudio are excited to host our first fully virtual conference this week, rstudio::global. We were so pleased to have so many of you join us this week, and while we wish we could see you all in person again, we were happy to have this opportunity to come together with the open source data science community. We will share a recap of the conference in after it concludes this Friday.

Before we dive back into our projects, I thought it would be a good time to look back at what kept us busy in 2020. While the year presented many challenges for everyone, we were pleased to continue to support and deliver value to the R and Python data science community. Below, I list some of the many highlights of the past year. No doubt I have missed a few, but these are some of the things I am particularly proud we were able to accomplish last year.

RStudio the Company

Our company grew significantly this year, despite the many challenges posed by COVID-19. As part of that growth, we:

• Started out 2020 with rstudio::conf, with thousands of attendees from around the world, both in person and virtually. You can watch all the talks from the conference here.
• Announced that RStudio is now a Public Benefit Corporation, with our open source mission codified into our corporate charter. Check out JJ Allaire’s rstudio::conf keynote for the full story. We also wrote about What Makes RStudio Different.
• Were honored to be named a Strong Performer in the Forrester Wave™: Notebook-Based Predictive Analytics and Machine Learning, Q3 2020.
• Wrote and spoke about the importance of Serious Data Science, why we focus on a code-based approach to data science, how Interoperability helps you leverage your entire analytic ecosystem, and how we provide a single home for R and Python Data Science.
• Delivered several webinars, many featuring our customers and partners, and were privileged to share several customer stories, featuring the great work our customers are doing. We were also thrilled and humbled by the many great reviews our customers provided on TrustRadius.

RStudio Products

On the product side, we significantly enhanced the capabilities of both our commercial and open source products. Specifically, we:

• Created and delivered new releases of the RStudio IDE, making it more accessible, as well as delivering many other enhancements, including the surprisingly popular rainbow parentheses. We also greatly expanded capabilities for native Python coding in the RStudio IDE, including a Python environment and object explorer.
• Expanded the capabilities of RStudio Connect, our centralized platform for sharing the work data science teams create in R and Python, including support for a full suite of interactive Python applications based on Dash, Bokeh and Streamlit. (See the announcements for Connect 1.8.4 and 1.8.6.) We also added the ability to share Python APIs (via Flask) in Connect 1.8.2.
• Updated RStudio Package Manager, introducing support for Windows binaries, bioconductor, and beta support for PyPI packages. We also introduced Public Package Manager as a free service.
• Officially launched RStudio Cloud, our cloud-based platform for doing, teaching, and learning data science using only a browser–and promised we will always offer a free plan for casual users. We were gratified to hear great responses from the many people using RStudio Cloud to teach and learn data science.

R and Python Packages

RStudio also expanded its wealth of free and open-source packages available to the larger data science community in 2020. Some of the significant development included:

• Announcing in January that sparklyr is available on CRAN, enabling R users to scale datasets across computing clusters running Apache Spark. We later announced support for Apache Avro in sparklyr.
• Providing native access to Torch, making one of the most widely used deep learning frameworks available to R users.
• Introducing the gt package (short for “grammar of tables”), to help R users reliably and efficiently create beautiful customized display tables. We also had a great response to our RStudio Table contest.

And of course, the tidyverse team was as productive as always this year, releasing (among other things) upgrades to:

• forcats,
• ggplot2,
• tibble, and
• dplyr, which received a massive update as part of its official 1.0 release.

There were also significant updates to:

• pkgdown,
• readr,
• testthat,
• dbplyr,
• usethis, and
• magrittr.

The team also launched tidymodels.org, a central location for learning and using the tidymodels packages.

Finally, in support of online scientific and technical communication, we introduced the 1.0 version of the distill package, as well as real-time visual editing of R Markdown documents. We also introduced many other updates and enhancements to R Markdown.

To Learn More

2020 was a busy year, and I am sure there are still a dozen things I missed. I know it’s difficult to keep up with everything RStudio is doing, but hopefully the links I’ve included above will help. If you’d like to learn more about any of the professional products, please drop a line to sales@rstudio.com, or book at time talk with us using this link.

If you’d particularly like to learn more about the many ways that RStudio provides a single home for data science teams using R and Python, we encourage you to register for our upcoming webinar on February 3rd.

Here’s to a happy, healthy, and productive 2021 for all of us!