Five highlights from posit::conf(2024)

2024-08-22

What an amazing conference! It was a blast connecting with our community in Seattle—whether through inspiring talks, fun social events, hands-on workshops, or great discourse on Discord.

There were so many exciting moments, but we wanted to share a few highlights from Posit. Did you miss a session? Recordings will be available on the event portal for the next three months (registration required) and will be on our YouTube channel afterward.

Positron, the next-gen IDE for data science

Positron is a next-generation data science IDE that is newly available to the community for early beta testing. This new IDE is an extensible tool built to facilitate exploratory data analysis, reproducible authoring, and publishing data artifacts. Positron currently supports these data workflows in either or both Python and/or R and is designed with a forward-looking architecture that can support other data science languages in the future. Built on the same foundation as VS Code, Positron offers a powerful text editor with additional data-science features like a dedicated Console, a Plot pane, Viewer pane, and a Data Explorer while opening the door to a world of VS Code extensions for those who want more. Test it out today!

Quarto for dashboards, PDFs, teaching, stories…

Quarto, the next-generation tool for technical publishing, has had a standout year! During the opening keynote, Charlotte Wickham shared some exciting updates. Quarto 1.4, released in January, introduced dashboards, Typst for PDFs, and support for Shinylive for Python (also available in R). Quarto 1.5 followed with a native Julia engine and enhanced Typst functionality. Fun fact: our own PBC report was created with Quarto!

The new QuartoLive extension brings WebAssembly-powered code blocks and exercises to Quarto HTML documents. George Stagg demonstrated how to use QuartoLive to create exercises with hints, solutions, and custom grading algorithms. In addition, the HTML-based output works on constrained devices like mobile phones.

The community continues to extend Quarto to add even more functionality. Explore Mickaël Canouil’s Extensions Gallery for examples, including Andrew Bray’s scrollytelling extension!

Shiny keeps getting shinier

At conf, the Shiny team demonstrated how Shiny developers can embrace AI, with Joe Cheng sharing a Shiny app featuring an AI-powered sidebot and Winston Chang showcasing the Shiny Assistant. People are already building some amazing things with the Shiny Assistant, and you can sign up for invite-only access here.

Carson Sievert introduced the shinywidgets package in Python, bringing ipywidgets’ interactive web-based visualizations to Shiny. Now, Shiny for Python users can use Jupyter Widgets as Shiny outputs.

Barret Schloerke followed by demonstrating how to create editable data frames in Shiny for Python, enabling real-time data manipulation directly within interactive web apps.

Greg Swinehart highlighted the team’s efforts to make Shiny apps look great right out of the box, from colors to components. With the new components and layout galleries (coming soon to Shiny for R), it’s even easier to get started with app development.

Posit Connect Cloud for online deployment

In the Data Engineering track, Alex Chisholm spoke about online publishing solutions that make it easier for non-engineers to deploy apps and docs to the world. His talk walked through an overview of the current deployment landscape and introduced Posit Connect Cloud—a new platform that simplifies the deployment of code-first data science outputs by turning code in public GitHub repositories into shareable URLs. Ready to deploy? Give it a try today!

Even more ways to connect to your data with Databricks and Snowflake

Whether you’re working on the Desktop, in the Cloud, or anywhere in between, you can enjoy a familiar, accessible environment. We’ve partnered with leading cloud platforms like Databricks and Snowflake to support large enterprises with infrastructure management, data access, control, and app deployment. James Blair shared some recent improvements:

Updated odbc package for easier connections to Snowflake and Databricks
Simplified sign-on and session authentication for Posit Workbench users
Native support for authentication in Posit Connect

Learn more about our Snowflake and Databricks partnerships.

Keep learning, connecting, and impacting change

These are just a few conference highlights, but there have been significant strides in developing even more powerful open-source tools. From Keras 3 for R and Great Tables (which is bringing reactable to Python) to censored for survival analysis, there’s a lot more to explore from posit::conf.

We hosted over 20 exciting workshops – find the workshop materials here!
We are compiling talk materials on GitHub, but if you’re looking for something specific, feel free to reach out directly to the speaker.
Check out community members Sharon Machlis’ Mastodon toot dashboard and Prasanna Bhogale’s handy list of links from the conference.

It was such a joy to connect with so many data enthusiasts, both in person and virtually! Let’s keep that momentum going—join us at our monthly end-to-end Posit team demos and weekly Data Science Hangout.