2021 at RStudio: A Year in Review

Photo by Eyestetix Studio on Unsplash

Happy New Year! As we’re settling back into our routines, we wanted to share some highlights of the work done across the company last year. This is just a few of our teams’ great accomplishments in supporting the R and Python data science community — there are too many to list! — and we encourage you to take a look at the links to find out more.

RStudio and Interoperability

• We continued our commitment to interoperability with support for business intelligence (BI) tools.
• We expanded our support for Python.
• We also have more options for how we support our customers’ journey in the cloud, including announcing RStudio on Amazon SageMaker.

RStudio and the Community

• RStudio’s 2021 virtual conference, rstudio::global, ran around the clock with exciting events for its 17,000 attendees. See the talks on the RStudio website.
  • We offered 70 diversity scholarships to attendees from underrepresented groups.
• We mentored 20 BIPOC students as part of our mentorship program.
• We saw so many amazing examples from the community during the 3rd Annual Shiny contest, 2nd Annual Table contest, and 1st Annual RViews Call for Documentation.
• We launched the RStudio Enterprise Community Meetups and Data Science Hangouts for open and friendly opportunities to meet with others from the community. Join our next Data Science Hangout on Thursday, January 6th!

RStudio Open-Source Packages

There are a lot of exciting releases for open-source packages. Below, we link to relevant places where you can find out more.

• Check out the tidyverse team’s announcements of package releases and updates on the tidyverse website.
  • The tidymodels team wrote a 2021 round-up on the tidyverse blog.
• See updates from the mlverse on the RStudio AI blog.
• Find R Markdown updates and general open source topics in the ‘Open Source’ category of the RStudio blog.
• The publication of several packages and their updates on CRAN, just a few of which include:
  • rmarkdown;
  • plumber;
  • knitr;
  • keras;
  • pins;
  • Shiny; and
  • sparklyr.

RStudio Products

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

• We moved to calendar versioning for our commercial products.
• In addition, we have a new and improved Solutions website to help you get the most from the products you’ve purchased.

RStudio Cloud

RStudio Cloud has made it easier to share, do, teach, and learn data science. See the What’s New with RStudio Cloud page for more information, such as the addition of more disk space and hours in RStudio Cloud plans.

RStudio Connect

Users of RStudio Connect have more tools to create great experiences for their stakeholders. We summarize the updates in the RStudio Connect Year in Review blog post, including:

• Connectwidgets for organizing, distributing, and finding projects;
• Updates for Python developers; and
• Support for Tableau Analytics Extensions.

RStudio IDE

We released RStudio 1.4, with many exciting features for the IDE. Check out the release notes for the full list of new features, including:

• A visual markdown editor;
• New Python capabilities; and
• Support for rainbow parentheses.

Watch a quick tour of RStudio 1.4 here:

RStudio Workbench

In June, we renamed RStudio Server Pro to RStudio Workbench to reflect the product’s growing support for a wide range of different development environments. This year, we’ve added:

• VS Code as a fully supported development environment;
• Multiple Python-based improvements; and
• Additional R and RStudio-based improvements.

More information is available in the release notes.

RStudio Package Manager

RStudio Package Manager has also seen a variety of upgrades, with a more versatile repository calendar, more flexibility in serving multiple binary package versions, and more options for configuring git sources. The release notes have more details on these features.

Keep in Touch

Thanks for taking a look at all the exciting work from 2021! Want to stay informed?

• Sign up on our subscription page to receive announcements on new blog posts, events, and more.
• You can also follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.
• If you’d like to learn more about any of the professional products, please drop a line to sales@rstudio.com or schedule a time to chat with us using our booking system.

We’re excited for what 2022 has in store and are so grateful for our community. Thank you for all the ways you use data to improve lives and our knowledge of the world in such incredibly diverse ways.