Isabella Velásquez
Company News and Events

2024 Posit Year in Review

2025-01-15
Year in Review 2024

This marks my third year writing Posit’s Year in Review post, and I’m always so amazed at everything we’ve accomplished in a single year. Here, we provide a high-level overview of some of the incredible work happening at the company. It’s pretty long, but stick with us – it’s worth the read!

 

Posit and the community

 

We are proud to announce that Posit has joined the Open Source Pledge, a public declaration to invest in and sustain open-source ecosystems.

We also published our 2024 Public Beneficiary Corporation report, created with Quarto!

Posit::conf(2024) in Seattle was an exciting event! We shared workshop materials and published a YouTube playlist of posit::conf(2024) recordings. Mark your calendars for posit::conf(2025), which will be held in Atlanta on September 16-18. Registration is now open!

This was the year of contests at Posit, and the community amazed us with their creativity. Check out the winners of the Table Contest, Plotnine Contest, and Shiny Contest.

We also spotlighted the rise of open-source tools in the pharma industry. Roche showcased the use of R in the regulatory submission process and GSK shared the biostatistics toolkit for their team.

In our weekly Data Science Hangout series, we gained valuable insights from 48 industry leaders. Read about lessons from four senior leaders in the data space and the value of curiosity. Add the Hangout to your calendar to join the conversation live!

We also continued the End-to-End Data Science Workflows series, where we showcased 12 data pipelines using open-source tools together with Posit Team. Watch past recordings like how to connect to databases in Shiny. Add the event to your calendar to watch and participate in our live Q&A.

 

Announcing Positron, a next-generation IDE for data science

 

Positron, our new multilingual data science IDE, is now in Early Availability, Public Beta. In their posit::conf(2024) talk, the team walks through various features, such as a dedicated Console, Plot pane, Viewer pane, and Data Explorer, designed for exploratory data analysis, reproducible authoring, and publishing data artifacts. Try it out!

 

Open-source tools and packages

 

AI tools

 

We’ve seen an explosion of AI tools! Last year, we introduced GitHub Copilot in RStudio and the chattr package. This year, we added:

Pal is a tool built with ellmer for a library of ergonomic LLM assistants designed to help you complete repetitive, hard-to-automate tasks quickly. It’s only the beginning, and we can’t wait to see what you create with these tools!

 

Publishable Tables in R with gt and in Python with Great Tables

 

When it’s time to share your analysis, gt (for R) and Great Tables and reactable (for Python) make creating publishable tables effortless. There’s so much happening in the world of publishable tables that Rich Iannone wrote a blog post on all the exciting developments.

 

Quarto

 

Quarto is our next-generation R Markdown for creating documents with text and code in R, Python, Julia, or Observable. Quarto had three major releases this year, which included features such as:

For full details, read the blog posts on Quarto 1.4, 1.5, and 1.6. Also, check out our workshops on building dashboards and websites with Quarto.

 

Shiny

 

This year was big for Shiny, including the release of Shiny for Python 1.0.0! Python users can now build reactive, powerful web apps with tools like Shiny Express, templates, editable tables, shinywidgets, brand.yml, and more. Check out the component and layout galleries for quick setups and explore improved ways to test your apps.

For Shiny in R, new features like ExtendedTask make managing long-running applications easier, while updates to bslib help create stunning, polished apps.

 

Tidymodels

 

The tidymodels framework brings tidyverse principles to modeling and machine learning. This year, the team expanded the ecosystem with survival analysis, postprocessing preparation, fair machine learning, and more.

At posit::conf, the team introduced orbital, a package for running predictions of tidymodels workflows directly inside databases. One of our end-to-end workflows demonstrated using orbital with Snowflake.

 

Tidyverse

 

The tidyverse, an opinionated collection of R packages for data science, saw several exciting updates this year. Highlights include a series of enhancements to ggplot2 and dbplyr. The tidyverse also welcomed a new package, duckplyr, which enables you to use DuckDB as a backend for dplyr commands.

 

webR

 

webR lets you run R in the browser – no installation required! It’s pretty incredible. This year, we expanded its capabilities with:

  • Shinylive: Run Shiny apps in the browser without requiring installation or a server.
  • Quarto Live: Add webR chunks to your Quarto documents for interactive content.

We also explored the use of webR in FDA clinical trial submissions.

 

Other packages

 

Beyond the above, check out the news on S7 (for simplifying object-oriented programming in R), nanoparquet (for reading and writing Parquet files), plotnine (bringing the grammar of graphics to Python), and marquee (for native rich text formatting of text in graphics).

 

Professional products and the cloud

 

Posit Academy

 

Posit Academy is our mentor-led apprenticeship for enterprises looking to develop R and Python skills within their teams. This year, we launched an Intro to Shiny course.

 

Posit Connect Cloud

 

We introduced Posit Connect Cloud, a new way to share your R and Python content online! It uses a GitHub-centric deployment process to deploy Shiny, Streamlit, Quarto, Jupyter, R Markdown, Dash, or Bokeh content. The Beta release introduced private GitHub repository support and more.

 

Posit Team

 

Posit Team bundles our most popular products, Workbench, Connect, and Package Manager, into a comprehensive toolchain for data science teams using R and Python.

 

Posit Team Dedicated

 

If you want to use Posit Team in your organization’s cloud but prefer not to manage the setup, Posit Team Dedicated is the solution. This new service lets Posit Engineers install and maintain Posit Team in your cloud, so your users can access your organization’s data without the hassle of administration.

 

Posit Connect

 

Posit Connect is a publishing platform that makes sharing data science content fast, secure, and easy. This year, OAuth Integrations were introduced for enhanced data governance. These integrations eliminate the need to recreate external permissions and policies for each published app, ensuring users only see data they are authorized to access. Check out how OAuth works with Databricks and how Novo Nordisk is using it for modern data governance.

Other new features include:

  • Posit Publisher, a push-button publishing extension for VS Code and Positron
  • Publish and schedule Python and R scripts without needing them to be in an R Markdown or Quarto document
  • Custom email messages with Quarto

 

Posit Package Manager

 

Posit Package Manager provides a secure, reliable, and scalable way to distribute and manage R and Python packages within your organization. We are excited to announce that 2024 brings full feature parity between R and Python on Package Manager! This includes Git Builders for Python packages, offline PyPI repositories, curated repositories, security blocking, and more.

Other new features include:

  • Full remote administration via the Admin CLI.
  • Custom Metadata allows you to enrich Package Manager’s built-in package information with your own information, such as internal package scores.

 

Posit Workbench

 

Posit Workbench offers centralized management for Jupyter, RStudio, and VS Code. In 2024.12.0, we announced preview support for Positron!

This year, we also added Workbench-managed credentials so that users or admins no longer need to handle sensitive credentials or PATs themselves. For RStudio Pro users, this feature is available for AWS, Azure, Databricks, and Snowflake. For VS Code and Positron users, this is available for AWS, Databricks, and Snowflake.

Speaking of Snowflake, Posit Workbench is now available in Snowflake Container Services. Workbench provides a GUI-based sign-in to Workbench and Snowflake and an easy-to-setup ODBC connection. Multiple data scientists can access the same Posit Workbench environment while maintaining their individual Snowflake permissions.

Other new features also include Prometheus Session metrics for monitoring server and Workbench operational data and local resource limits for restricting resources per session in local servers.

 

Stay informed in 2025

 

As we begin 2025, we’re excited to keep the momentum going. posit::conf(2025) is just around the corner, and we can’t wait to bring the community together and dive even further into open-source data science tools. I hope that you join us — register today.

Explore the Posit blog, AI blog, Great Tables blog, plotnine blog, Quarto blog, Shiny blog, and tidyverse blog and learn how customers like NASA, CSL, and Dow are using R and Python to tackle some of the biggest data science challenges. 

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For more information on our professional products, contact us at sales@posit.co or schedule a time to chat using our booking system.

Tags: data science hangout great tables gt Posit Connect Posit Connect Cloud Posit Package Manager posit team Posit Workbench positron quarto shiny tidymodels tidyverse webR