posit::conf(2025)

The Psychology of Technologists (Cat Hicks, Catharsis Consulting) | posit::conf(2025)

The Psychology of Technologists Speaker(s): Cat Hicks Abstract: Technology teams are struggling to be heard. Technologists are grappling with high turnover, high burnout, and low resilience in the face of rapidly-accelerating technological change. Even though effective technical teams are an essential part of our world continuing to work, many organizations struggle to understand their technical teams, stuck in old stereotypes that treat technical people like isolated machines. To build a thriving future, we need a new way of working together and understanding our own minds as we build technology. In my empirical research across thousands of developers, technical managers and their teams, we’ve explored what a psychologically-rich environment looks like for modern technologists and found important signals that can guide teams toward greater resilience, innovation, and thriving. In this keynote we’ll unlock access to the psychological sciences and evidence that you can use to make your every day more human. Links: Dr. Cat Hicks - https://www.drcathicks.com/ Catharsis Consulting - https://www.catharsisinsight.com/ Center for Open Science (COS) - https://www.cos.io/ Fight for the Human Newsletter - https://www.fightforthehuman.com/ posit::conf(2025) Subscribe to posit::conf updates: https://posit.co/about/subscription-management/

Making the most of artificial and human intelligence for data science (Hadley Wickham, Joe Cheng)

Making the most of artificial and human intelligence for data science Speaker(s): Hadley Wickham; Joe Cheng Abstract: This presentation explores the complex and often contradictory nature of large language models (LLMs) in data science, acknowledging the simultaneous excitement and apprehension that we feel toward these technologies. We’ll provide a practical framework to help you understand the LLM ecosystem (from foundation models and hosting to SDKs and applications) that supports our current philosophy: augmenting, not replacing human intelligence. The talk demonstrates how Posit is addressing this space through two complementary approaches: building SDKs and tools that help you create your own LLM-powered solutions, and developing integrated LLM capabilities directly into data science workflows through tools like Positron assistant and databot. We’ll showcase practical, immediately useful applications while addressing current limitations, providing you with both the emotional preparation and technical foundation needed to effectively leverage LLMs in their data science practice today. posit::conf(2025) Subscribe to posit::conf updates: https://posit.co/about/subscription-management/

Hadley Wickham, Joe Cheng

Engineer Insightful Shiny Apps with Behavioral Science (Jeremy Winget, CrossStack) | posit::conf

Death by Dropdown? Engineer Insightful Shiny Apps with Behavioral Science Speaker(s): Jeremy Winget, PhD Abstract: Opening a Shiny app to endless dropdowns and scattered filters leads to immediate disengagement and feeling like “death by dropdown”. This talk introduces the Behavioral Insights Design (BID) Framework, a behavioral science roadmap that transforms overwhelming dashboards into guided user journeys. Using the “Interfaces Need A Smart Vision” mnemonic, we’ll explore five stages: Interpret user needs through data storytelling, Notice cognitive friction points, Anticipate user behavior, Structure the application, and Validate & empower users. Drawing from established theories and real-world production examples, attendees will see how applying behavioral science can dramatically reduce the time between “Where do I even start?” and “Aha, now I get it!”. You’ll leave with practical techniques using the new {bidux} package to help transform user confusion into confident exploration and build dashboards that guide users toward better decisions (and fewer ghosted users). BID Framework - https://github.com/jrwinget/bid-framework bidux docs - https://github.com/jrwinget/bidux posit::conf(2025) Subscribe to posit::conf updates: https://posit.co/about/subscription-management/

Birthing the pregnancy package (Ella Kaye, University of Warwick) | posit::conf(2025)

Birthing the pregnancy package Speaker(s): Ella Kaye Abstract: When I was pregnant, I wrote a personal, private package for date and medication calculations, hard-coded with my data. I thought it would be easy to adapt for general use, but no! I wanted the user experience to be excellent, but how to avoid them repeatedly entering the same due date and meds? How to print useful, nicely formatted, grammatically correct information to the console? How to test a package that relies on the current date? Using the pregnancy package as a case study, I’ll show how to take advantage of base R features such as global options and %||%, how the cli and rlang packages came to the rescue for messages and how testthat’s new mocking features saved the day (literally!) to create a package that’s a pleasure to use. Slides: https://github.com/EllaKaye/pregnancy-lightning-talk posit::conf(2025) Subscribe to posit::conf updates: https://posit.co/about/subscription-management/

Get the Latest on Posit’s Commercial Products | posit::conf(2025)

Get the Latest on Posit’s Commercial Products Speaker(s): Kelly O’Briant; Tom Mock; Joe Roberts; Kara Woo; Alex Chisholm; Chetan Thapar; Steve Nolen Abstract: Join us for an overview of the latest developments across Posit’s commercial product ecosystem. This session will cover Posit Workbench, Package Manager, Connect, Connect Cloud, and our growing portfolio of managed services including Snowflake and beyond. Hear directly from the product managers and engineers who are building these tools, and get insights into what’s coming next. 0:00 Introduction 3:30 Audited jobs, Positron Pro sessions, and GenAI in Workbench 14:20 Auth and integrations with RStudio Pro sessions in Package Manager 21:00 An intro to Chronicle for Posit Team 25:57 Building container images in Connect 39:50 Organization plans in Connect Cloud 49:00 A Snowflake Native App offering for Connect and Workbench 1:02:00 An intro to Posit Team Dedicated posit::conf(2025) Subscribe to posit::conf updates: https://posit.co/about/subscription-management/

Web applications with Shiny and React and AI (Winston Chang, Posit) | posit::conf(2025)

Web applications with Shiny and React (and AI) Speaker(s): Winston Chang If you’ve ever wanted to have complete control over the UI for a Shiny application, this talk might be for you. In this talk I’ll show how to integrate a back end written in Shiny (for R or Python) with a front end written in React.js. This lets you combine Shiny’s reactivity with the flexibility of the React web development ecosystem. In the past, writing a front end in React was a large time investment, and would be reserved only for a serious project. However, with today’s agentic AI coding tools, it can make sense to create a React front end even for smaller-scale applications. But even with AI involved, you will still need to know some React or be willing to learn about it. GitHub Repo - https://github.com/wch/shiny-react CLI tool - https://github.com/wch/create-shiny-react-app Anthropic Dashboard - https://github.com/wch/anthropic_dashboard posit::conf(2025) Subscribe to posit::conf updates: https://posit.co/about/subscription-management/

Winston Chang

Observability at scale (Barret Schloerke, Posit) | posit::conf(2025)

Observability at scale: Monitoring Shiny Applications with OpenTelemetry Speaker(s): Barret Schloerke Abstract: Understanding what happens behind the scenes in production Shiny applications has always been challenging. When users experience slow response times or unexpected behavior, developers are left guessing where bottlenecks occur. This talk introduces OpenTelemetry integration for Shiny for R, a new approach to profiling code and understanding application behavior. Through a chat-enabled weather application, we’ll explore how complex user interactions trigger cascading events across multiple processes. You’ll learn how OpenTelemetry’s “high-quality, ubiquitous, and portable telemetry” can provide complete visibility into your Shiny application’s performance with minimal setup… just a few environment variables! After walking through the chat app, you’ll have a taste of how to implement comprehensive monitoring for your Shiny applications in production, enabling you to proactively identify and resolve unexpected performance issues. Materials - https://github.com/schloerke/presentation-2025-09-17-posit-conf-otel posit::conf(2025) Subscribe to posit::conf updates: https://posit.co/about/subscription-management/

Barret Schloerke

surveydown (John Paul Helveston, GWU) | posit::conf(2025)

surveydown: A Markdown-Based Platform for Interactive and Reproducible Surveys Using Quarto and Shiny Speaker(s): John Paul Helveston Abstract: This talk introduces the surveydown R package and survey platform, which leverages the Quarto publication system and R shiny web framework to create reproducible and interactive surveys. While most survey platforms rely on graphical interfaces or spreadsheets to define survey content, surveydown uses plain text (markdown and R code chunks), enabling version control and collaboration via tools like GitHub. It supports complex features like conditional skip logic, dynamic questions, and complex randomization as well as a diverse set of question types and formatting options. The open-source package gives researchers full control over survey implementation and data storage, with reproducible workflows that integrate with R data analysis. GitHub Repo - https://github.com/surveydown-dev/surveydown Materials - https://github.com/jhelvy/2025-posit-conf-surveydown posit::conf(2025) Subscribe to posit::conf updates: https://posit.co/about/subscription-management/

Election Night Reporting Using R & Quarto (Andrew Heiss & Gabe Osterhout) | posit::conf(2025)

Election Night Reporting Using R & Quarto Speaker(s): Gabe Osterhout; Andrew Heiss Abstract: Election night reporting (ENR) is often clunky, outdated, and overpriced. The Idaho Secretary of State’s office leveraged R and Quarto to create a better ENR product for the end user while driving down costs using the open-source software we all know and love. With help from Dr. Andrew Heiss, R was used in every step of the process—from {dbplyr} backend to visualizing the results using {reactable} tables and {leaflet} maps, combining the output into a visually appealing Quarto website. Quarto was the ideal solution due to its scalability, quick deployment, responsive design, and easy navigation. In addition, Dr. Heiss will discuss the advantages of using a {targets} pipeline and creating programmatic code chunks in Quarto. GitHub Repo - https://github.com/andrewheiss/election-desk posit::conf(2025) Subscribe to posit::conf updates: https://posit.co/about/subscription-management/

Theming Made Easy: Introducing brand.yml (Garrick Aden-Buie, Posit) | posit::conf(2025)

Theming Made Easy: Introducing brand.yml Speaker(s): Garrick Aden-Buie Abstract: brand.yml is an exciting new project from Posit that radically simplifies theming. Every data science tool supports some form of theme and appearance customization, but each app framework, output format, or visualization tool requires its own special syntax for theming. The goal of brand.yml is to create a portable and unified interface for brand-related theming that can be used anywhere that data science artifacts are produced. As a collaboration between the Shiny and Quarto teams, brand.yml provides a single interface to setting baseline themes in reports and apps across the R and Python ecosystems. In this talk, I’ll introduce brand.yml and showcase the many ways that brand.yml can bring consistent styles to your data science outputs. Materials - https://github.com/gadenbuie/brand-yml-posit-conf-2025 Slides - https://pkg.garrickadenbuie.com/brand-yml-posit-conf-2025 posit::conf(2025) Subscribe to posit::conf updates: https://posit.co/about/subscription-management/

Garrick Aden-Buie

posit::conf(2025)

Keynotes#

10 Years of Data Science Tools…and What Happens Next (Jonathan McPherson) | posit::conf(2025)

The Psychology of Technologists (Cat Hicks, Catharsis Consulting) | posit::conf(2025)

Making the most of artificial and human intelligence for data science (Hadley Wickham, Joe Cheng)

Trustworthy Data Visualization (Kieran Healy, Duke University) | posit::conf(2025)

September 16: Workshops and Virtual Day#

Virtual Day AMA with Rich Iannone | posit::conf(2025)

Virtual Day Q & A Hangout with Virtual Speakers | posit::conf(2025)

September 17#

Talks#

Modular, layout-as-code approach for customizable Shiny dashboards (Kim Schouten, De NZa)

Outgrowing Your Laptop with Positron (Austin Dickey, Posit) | posit::conf(2025)

Teaching data visualization with R entirely in Quarto (Claus Wilke, UT Austin) | posit::conf(2025)

AskRADS: An AI Recommendation Agent for Maximizing ROI of Data Science Collaborations (Regis James)

ChalkTalk: Globalizing Data Science Education with AI-generated Videos (Kene David Nwosu)

Exploring Datasets in Positron (Wes McKinney, Posit) | posit::conf(2025)

shinyGovStyle- accessible gov design in RShiny (Cameron Race & Sarah Wong-Brown) | posit::conf(2025)

Engineer Insightful Shiny Apps with Behavioral Science (Jeremy Winget, CrossStack) | posit::conf

Empowering Learners with WebR, Pyodide, and Quarto (Ted Laderas, Fred Hutch) | posit::conf(2025)

Is that LLM feature any good? (Simon P. Couch, Posit) | posit::conf(2025)

Tips & tricks from the maintainers of Positron (Sharon Wang & Melissa Barca) | posit::conf(2025)

Design of Everyday Shiny Apps (Casey Aguilar-Gervase & Maya Gans, Atorus) | posit::conf(2025)

IDE-ntity Crisis: Choosing the Right Tool for Me (Isabel Zimmerman, Posit) | posit::conf(2025)

Leveraging LLMs for student feedback in introductory data science courses (Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel)

Trust, but Verify: Lessons from Deploying LLMs in a Large Health System (Timothy Keyes)

AI Coding Assistants: Hype, Help, or Hindrance? (Rebecca Barter, Arine) | posit::conf(2025)

Approaching Positron from RStudio (Mauro Lepore, Recast) | posit::conf(2025)

Birthing the pregnancy package (Ella Kaye, University of Warwick) | posit::conf(2025)

Positron for Babies: Communicating Technical Concepts to all Audiences (Ryan Johnson)

Get the Latest on Posit’s Commercial Products | posit::conf(2025)

Old Apps, New Tricks: How AI can write Automated Tests for your Shiny Apps (Karan Gathani, Posit)

Automating Event Scheduling with Python in Positron (Becky Hodge, ProCogia) | posit::conf(2025)

Brand YML and Dark Mode in Quarto (Gordon Woodhull, Posit) | posit::conf(2025)

Enabling geospatial workflow management with targets (Eric Scott, UArizona) | posit::conf(2025)

Use Your Data Skills for Good (Sharon Machlis) | posit::conf(2025)

Web applications with Shiny and React and AI (Winston Chang, Posit) | posit::conf(2025)

What we’re doing to make Quarto fast(er) (Carlos Scheidegger, Posit) | posit::conf(2025)

Teaching Data Sharing through R Data Packages (Kelly McConville, Bucknell) | posit::conf(2025)

Observability at scale (Barret Schloerke, Posit) | posit::conf(2025)

From Solo to Social: Making Coding a Collaborative Adventure (Allissa Dillman, BioData Sage)

On Teaching Adults to Code (Kristin Bott, Posit) | posit::conf(2025)

Shinystate (Eric Nantz, Eli Lilly) | posit::conf(2025)

Building Governable ML Models with R (Tom Shafer, Elder Research) | posit::conf(2025)

How non-programmers can make sparks fly when using testthat during package development (L. McKenna)

duckplyr: Analyze large data with full dplyr compatibility (Kirill Müller, cynkra)

surveydown (John Paul Helveston, GWU) | posit::conf(2025)

There’s a new Plumber in town (Thomas Lin Pedersen, Posit) | posit::conf(2025)

Air - A blazingly fast R code formatter (Davis Vaughn & Lionel Henry, Posit) | posit::conf(2025)

Semantic Search for the Rest of Us with DuckDB (Marcos Huerta, Carmax) | posit::conf(2025)

Using Quarto to Improve Formatting/Automate the Generation of Hundreds of Reports (Keaton Wilson)

Instant Impact: Developing {docorator} to Simplify R Adoption for Teams (Becca Krouse, GSK)

Keeping Data Alive: Persistent Storage Options for Dynamic Cloud Applications (Alex Chisholm, Posit)

Making Things Nice in Python (Rich Iannone, Posit) | posit::conf(2025)

Oops! I accidentally made a production dashboard (Jonathan Keane, Posit) | posit::conf(2025)

Expanding Quarto’s Capabilities with Lua (Christophe Dervieux, Posit) | posit::conf(2025)

Get Your Ducks in a Row with Databases (Melissa Albino Hegeman, NYS OGS) | posit::conf(2025)

Lift Off! Building REST APIs that Fly (Joe Kirincic, RESTORE-Skills) | posit::conf(2025)

The Curse of Documentation (Michael Chow, Posit) | posit::conf(2025)

AI-Powered Data Science in Positron (Ryan Johnson, Posit) | posit::conf(2025)

Exploring Extensions from the Posit Connect Gallery (Toph Allen) | posit::conf(2025)

Data Science Hangout (Rachael Dempsey, Posit & Matthew Montero, GenRe) | posit::conf(2025)

September 18#

Talks#

Data-as-a-product: A framework for collaborative data wrangling (Clara Amorosi, BMS) | posit::conf

Disposable Shiny Apps (James Wade, Dow) | posit::conf(2025)

Elevating Public Health Decision-Making with R Packages (Kylie Ainslie, RIVM) | posit::conf(2025)

Purrrfectly parallel, purrrfectly distributed (Charlie Gao, Posit) | posit::conf(2025)

R-multiverse: a new way to publish R packages (Will Landau, Eli Lilly) | posit::conf(2025)

Ripples of Change with R- It’s more than just coding (Yvonne Kienast, CIHI) | posit::conf(2025)

Data 911: how Posit can support decision-makers in times of environmental crisis (Marcus Beck)

Quarto for Business Collaboration & Technical Documentation in Word docx format (Bill Pikounis, J&J)

Practical {renv} (Shannon Pileggi, The PCCTC) | posit::conf(2025)

See if talking to the doctor is right for you (Max Hockstein, Georgetown) | posit::conf(2025)

Talk data to me: How to present youR data to any audience (Freda Warner, CIHR) | posit::conf(2025)

What R We Counting? (Ben Arancibia, GSK) | posit::conf(2025)

A tale of one organization: learning how to swim in the ocean of open source (Katerina Gapanenko)

Election Night Reporting Using R & Quarto (Andrew Heiss & Gabe Osterhout) | posit::conf(2025)

Extending the horizons of R with Rust (Andrés Quintero, ixpantia) | posit::conf(2025)

Theming Made Easy: Introducing brand.yml (Garrick Aden-Buie, Posit) | posit::conf(2025)