Blog

Author: Gigi Kenneth

Published: August 5, 2026.

Most regulated firms still run SAS. The question is whether to keep it. Why it lasted, why firms hold on too long, and the risks of a SAS to R migration.

Author: Russ Hyde

Published: July 30, 2026.

In this blog post we outline some reasons why it is valuable to learn how to use the command line as a data scientist.

Author: Gigi Kenneth

Published: July 29, 2026.

Choosing a development environment shapes how a team writes, reviews, and ships analysis. Join our free 13 August webinar for a live look at Positron and Posit Assistant, led by Kia Mack.

Author: Tim Brock

Published: July 16, 2026.

Using a sample flight-departures dashboard, we walk through five things that are easy to miss before launch: responsive layout, touchscreen support, accessibility, and both real and perceived performance.

Authors: Russ Hyde & Keith Newman

Published: June 25, 2026.

Jumping Rivers recently hosted the conference "AI In Production 2026" where experts across software engineering and data science discussed how to actually use AI in software products and data projects. The talks also touched on security, regulatory matters, AI usage across different sectors and how AI has impacted the process of software development. Here we summarise the conference talks. "AI In Production 2027" will be held 10-11 June 2027.

Author: Gigi Kenneth

Published: May 28, 2026.

AI in Production takes place on 4–5 June at The Catalyst in Newcastle. Here is the full lineup: workshops, lightning talks, keynotes, and conference sessions across the Engineering and Machine Learning streams.

Author: Tim Brock

Published: May 28, 2026.

Some thoughts on learning to use Claude to write Bash shell scripts and improve my productivity.

Author: Gigi Kenneth

Published: May 1, 2026.

A full schedule of online data science training courses is now available through to November 2026, covering R, Python, machine learning, statistical modelling, Shiny, and more. All sessions run online over six hours.

Author: Russ Hyde

Published: April 16, 2026.

Here we summarise some of the more interesting changes in the April 2026 release of R 4.6.0.

Author: Gigi Kenneth

Published: April 14, 2026.

Learn how to work with Large Language Models programmatically in R and Python, from sending API requests to generating structured outputs and summarising content.

Author: Myles Mitchell

Published: April 9, 2026.

It has been almost ten years since Jumping Rivers was founded in 2016. Over that time we have developed over 50 different training courses spanning R, Python, SQL, Git and more. In this post we will lift the lid on our training stack and share how we have used internal R packages and GitLab to automate the full process.

Author: Gigi Kenneth

Published: April 1, 2026.

Meet the sponsors making AI in Production 2026 possible. The conference takes place on 4–5 June in Newcastle upon Tyne.

Author: Theo Roe

Published: March 26, 2026.

Over the course of my career as a Data Scientist, I've worked on projects ranging from simple code reviews, to large application builds. For the most part, I have used R to do this. If you're getting into coding or data science, one question you're probably asking yourself is "Which language should I learn?". This blog aims to show you why R might be a good decision.

Author: Russ Hyde

Published: March 19, 2026.

Teams may need a way to reliably generate datasets and data products from newly-collected raw data that is robust to the evolution of both the team and the raw data. This is where 'Reproducible Analytical Pipelines' (RAPs) can help.

Authors: Sebastian Mellor & Gigi Kenneth

Published: March 13, 2026.

A practical recap of three Posit platform features that are easy to miss but worth using: faster R package installs with Package Manager, one-click example apps in Connect Gallery, and persistent Workbench Jobs.

Author: Tim Brock

Published: March 12, 2026.

Introducing the Frontend Dashboard Health Check!

Author: Gigi Kenneth

Published: March 11, 2026.

Explore the hands-on workshops taking place on Day 1 of AI in Production 2026 in Newcastle, covering LLM integration, Databricks architecture, Shiny apps with AI, and self-hosted LLM infrastructure.

Author: Gigi Kenneth

Published: March 5, 2026.

Join our free webinar exploring data processing workflows in pandas and polars, comparing syntax, performance considerations, and updates introduced in pandas 3.0.

Author: Gigi Kenneth

Published: February 17, 2026.

We’ve been approved to sell our services through the Crown Commercial Service CCS, providing a simpler and compliant route for UK public sector organisations to work with us.

Author: Gigi Kenneth

Published: February 11, 2026.

Join our free webinar on maintaining Posit environments in production, covering stability, security, scaling, and long term system management.

Author: Colin Gillespie

Published: February 5, 2026.

Explore how to optimise your Git workflow with a well-crafted .gitconfig file. From commit signing and branch management to conditional includes for work-personal separation, learn the settings that transform Git into a seamless development tool.

Author: Osheen MacOscar

Published: January 22, 2026.

Ever had trouble adding alt text to your dynamic plots and tables within Shiny apps? That's where ellmer comes in, allowing us to query LLM APIs and generate suitable alt text.

Author: Gigi Kenneth

Published: January 20, 2026.

Submitting a talk is not about promotion. It is a way to reflect on your work, invite useful feedback, and turn hard-won experience into something others can learn from.

Author: Myles Mitchell

Published: January 8, 2026.

Learn about retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) workflows for large language models. This blog provides a hands-on introduction, including example code for creating a working knowledge store using open source packages in R.

Author: Amieroh Abrahams

Published: December 18, 2025.

A festive, tongue-in-cheek machine learning experiment that puts the Jumping Rivers team on Santa’s Naughty List.

Author: Amieroh Abrahams

Published: December 8, 2025.

Level up your Shiny skills with Jumping Rivers’ free 55-minute accessibility webinars, designed to help you build inclusive, professional apps that work for everyone. Join the community, learn practical techniques, and unlock exclusive discounts when you register.

Author: Osheen MacOscar

Published: December 4, 2025.

"In part three of this blog series, I am going to improve the efficiency of the function written in part one using parallisation."

Author: Gigi Kenneth

Published: December 2, 2025.

A simple guide to help first time speakers write clear, useful conference abstracts that reviewers can understand and audiences can benefit from.

Author: Amieroh Abrahams

Published: November 27, 2025.

Start 2026 strong with Jumping Rivers’ hands-on online training courses, designed to boost your skills, confidence, and career prospects in just a few focused hours.

Author: Tim Brock

Published: November 20, 2025.

A brief introduction to Figma Design and some its most useful features, aimed at creators of data dashboards.

Author: Gigi Kenneth

Published: November 19, 2025.

Registration is open for the first AI in Production conference, taking place in Newcastle Upon Tyne on 4 and 5 June 2026.

Author: Amieroh Abrahams

Published: November 17, 2025.

Stay ahead of the curve with Jumping Rivers’ next free monthly webinar, 'Machine Learning with Python', where you’ll level up your data skills in just 55 minutes and unlock exclusive learning perks.

Author: Myles Mitchell

Published: November 13, 2025.

Did you know that we organise free, in-person data science meetups? In this post we will talk through the typical format and topics at our meetups, along with some details for how you can get involved!

Author: Russ Hyde

Published: November 6, 2025.

Here we compare the syntax of two Python libraries, Pandas and Polars for standard data-manipulation tasks.

Authors: Aida Gjoka, Osheen MacOscar, Keith Newman & Russ Hyde

Published: November 3, 2025.

This October, Jumping Rivers hosted the fourth installment of our conference "Shiny In Production". Here we summarise the talks and workshops that were presented.

Author: Amieroh Abrahams

Published: October 28, 2025.

Boost your data expertise with hands-on, expert-led training from Jumping Rivers. Our experienced data scientists deliver practical courses in R, Python, Git, AI, and more, designed to help you apply new skills immediately. With flexible online and in-person options, comprehensive materials, and tailored in-house programmes, Jumping Rivers empowers individuals and teams to thrive in today’s data-driven world.

Author: Osheen MacOscar

Published: October 23, 2025.

"In part two of this blog series, I am going to demonstrate how to use document, test and publish a python package."

Author: Russ Hyde

Published: October 16, 2025.

Python 3.14 was released in October. Here we summarise some of the more interesting changes and some trends in Python development and data-science over the past year.

Author: Amieroh Abrahams

Published: October 13, 2025.

Join our free Jumping Rivers webinar, “Understanding Posit: Ecosystem and Use Cases,” to discover how Posit tools like Connect, Workbench, and Package Manager can power scalable, collaborative data workflows.

Author: Osheen MacOscar

Published: October 9, 2025.

In this two-part blog series, I am going to demonstrate how to use Poetry to create a Python package, set up testing infrastructure and install it.

Author: Aida Gjoka

Published: September 25, 2025.

One of our main projects at Jumping Rivers in the last year has been building the Litmusverse, a platform for validation. An important component when assessing the quality of code within a package is the unit tests. In this blog we discuss the main features of the `{testthat}` package, as a very convenient way for testing R code.

Author: Amieroh Abrahams

Published: September 15, 2025.

Our free monthly webinar series is back, and the first session on 21 August – “Reports that Write Themselves: Automated Reporting with Quarto” was a fantastic success! It was wonderful to see the Jumping Rivers community grow, with so many data professionals joining, engaging, and sharing ideas.

Author: Shane Halloran

Published: September 11, 2025.

In this blog I’ll share real-world lessons from deploying Posit Workbench on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), including practical debugging tips, common pitfalls, and the importance of looking beyond the cluster when issues arise.

Author: Amieroh Abrahams

Published: September 9, 2025.

At Jumping Rivers, we streamline data workflows with engineering, automation, and analytics. We handle the tasks you can’t, optimise the ones you didn’t know could be improved, and work alongside your team to make operations easier, smarter, and faster.

Author: Myles Mitchell

Published: August 28, 2025.

We introduce the ARIMA framework for time series forecasting and demonstrate the process using a real world example with Python. Along the way we explore the time series analysis functions provided by the statsmodels library and cover best practices for selecting the ARIMA model parameters.

Author: Theo Roe

Published: August 14, 2025.

For quite some time, AI had kept it's grubby little hands out of the music production world. Now, a good percentage of the plugins (a plugin is a piece of software you can "plug in" to an audio track to add effects or generate audio) I see are advertised as "using AI". From reverb removers (yes, that's right, you can now remove the reverb from an audio recording), to EQ analysers. Today we'll focus on stem separation.

Author: Amieroh Abrahams

Published: August 12, 2025.

When it comes to data science training, one size doesn’t fit all. At Jumping Rivers, we’ve built our reputation around delivering customised, expert-led training that actually fits your team’s goals, tools, and workflows - whether you're in healthcare, government, finance, or beyond.

Authors: Aida Gjoka & Osheen MacOscar

Published: August 5, 2025.

Shiny in Production Conference is fast approaching and we wouldn't be able to put it on without the support of our sponsors!

Author: Osheen MacOscar

Published: July 31, 2025.

In this blog we will create an animated map of the gapminder life expectancy data using {ggplot2} and {gganimate}. In the process we will cover some of the common pitfalls when working with spatial data and how to get round them!

Author: Heather Turner

Published: July 24, 2025.

Do you use R? Would you like to play a part in sustaining it? Find out about the R Dev Day that is returning as a satellite event to Shiny in Production 2025.

Author: Russ Hyde

Published: July 17, 2025.

Importing data is a key step in the data science workflow. How you import a dataset has consequences for how you work with that data throughout a project.

Author: Colin Gillespie

Published: July 15, 2025.

How often do bugs get fixed? Does the package use source control? Is the package a solo or a group effort? These questions aid our understanding about the long-term viability of a package, and how "risky" it is.

Author: Colin Gillespie

Published: July 10, 2025.

Code quality is what typically comes to mind when talking about "good packages". Does that package pass standard checks? What is the Unit test coverage? How many dependencies does the package have? This post discusses how we use code quality when determining the package litmus score.

Author: Amieroh Abrahams

Published: July 8, 2025.

Are you ready to expand your knowledge in R, Python, Shiny, and Posit while becoming a more valuable asset to your team? Jumping Rivers is here to help you do just that with our free monthly webinar series designed for data professionals at all levels.

Author: Colin Gillespie

Published: July 3, 2025.

Not all R packages are clearly “good” or “risky”, most fall somewhere in between. This post introduces our scoring framework around package documentation. We investigate the different measures, then look at a few well known packages.

Author: Pedro Silva

Published: June 30, 2025.

In regulated industries, Shiny apps must be reliable, reproducible, and well-documented. Validation builds trust, supports compliance, and prevents costly delays. Learn how to avoid common pitfalls and set up a lightweight, effective validation approach that scales with your needs. Validation isn’t a blocker, it’s a long-term advantage for you and your team.

Author: Colin Gillespie

Published: June 26, 2025.

The popularity of an R package can be measured using package downloads and reverse dependencies. While these measures clearly have issues, they do provide a good indication of the package health. This post looks at these measures in more detail.

Authors: Aida Gjoka & Osheen MacOscar

Published: June 24, 2025.

We are pleased to announce the lightning talks for this year's Shiny in Production conference! In this blog post, we've pulled together all of the talk abstracts to give you a full view of what to expect!

Authors: Colin Gillespie & Astrid Radermacher

Published: June 19, 2025.

Not all R packages are clearly “good” or “risky”, most fall somewhere in between. This post introduces a scoring framework to help users assess package quality, based on documentation, code, maintenance, and popularity. We also share key principles to ensure the scores are useful, fair, and adaptable to different contexts.

Authors: Aida Gjoka & Osheen MacOscar

Published: June 17, 2025.

We are pleased to announce the full length talks for this year's Shiny in Production conference! In this blog post, we've pulled together all of the talk abstracts to give you a full view of what to expect!

Author: Amieroh Abrahams

Published: June 9, 2025.

At Jumping Rivers, we believe training should be more than just a tick-box exercise. It should be transformative. Whether you’re learning R, Python, SQL, Git or Posit for the first time or diving into advanced topics like machine learning and Quarto, our courses are built to help you actually use what you learn — not just watch someone code.

Authors: Tim Brock & Clarissa Barratt

Published: June 5, 2025.

Adding images to a web page used to be easy. Now with high-resolution screens and an array of modern image formats it can feel like much more work. This post explains why things have become more complex and suggestions solutions for making life a little easier and web pages more performant.

Author: Theo Roe

Published: May 22, 2025.

From a purely design aspect, Quarto's standard output for PowerPoint falls short. You're limited to seven layout options, with the most complicated being "Two Content". The {officer} R package provides a great alternative, for those seeking total control and customisation.

Author: Osheen MacOscar

Published: May 20, 2025.

The details of all of our workshops for Shiny in Production are now live on the conference website. Read on for full details all in one place.

Authors: Aida Gjoka & Russ Hyde

Published: May 8, 2025.

Writing tests is one of the best ways to keep your Python code reliable and reproducible. This post builds on our previous blog about Python testing with pytest, and explores some of the more advanced features it offers. We will show how to make your tests more reproducible, easier to manage and demonstrate how writing simple tests can save you time in the long run.

Authors: Russ Hyde, Keith Newman, Pedro Silva, Tim Brock & Colin Gillespie

Published: April 15, 2025.

At Jumping Rivers we love data dashboards and are delighted to announce the release of a gallery to showcase our application-development skills.

Author: Russ Hyde

Published: April 10, 2025.

Here we summarise some of the more interesting changes that have been introduced in R 4.5.0.

Author: Tim Brock

Published: April 8, 2025.

All our videos from Shiny in Production 2024, collected together in one place.

Authors: Pedro Silva, Astrid Radermacher & Colin Gillespie

Published: April 7, 2025.

The Litmusverse is a suite of R tools that automates the risk assessment, scoring, and reporting of R packages—supporting compliance in regulated environments. Built for use across CRAN, Bioconductor, and internal repos, it helps teams streamline package approval and maintain a production-ready R ecosystem.

Authors: Astrid Radermacher & Colin Gillespie

Published: March 31, 2025.

Wondering if your R package collection is any good? It all boils down to your risk appetite. Happy to wing it? Go for it! Need rock-solid reliability? You'll want proper validation.

Author: Osheen MacOscar

Published: March 27, 2025.

In this blog I will demonstrate how to use sparkline reactable tables in a Shiny app. Thankfully {reactable} has some helpful functions that make this super easy!

Author: Osheen MacOscar

Published: March 13, 2025.

Following on from the first blog in the series where we looked at getting started with the sparkline package, we are now looking at how to use them in {reactable} HTML tables.

Author: Osheen MacOscar

Published: March 11, 2025.

Due to popular demand we are extending the abstract deadline for Shiny in Production 2025, to be held on 8th-9th October 2025 in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. Read on for more details on how to submit your work.

Author: Myles Mitchell

Published: February 27, 2025.

Part 4 of our series of blogs on vetiver for MLOps. Having previously explained how to set up an MLOps workflow in R, we now turn to Python. This blog will introduce the vetiver package for Python and outline the key MLOps steps including model versioning, deployment and monitoring.

Author: Osheen MacOscar

Published: February 17, 2025.

We are excited to announce the Call for Abstracts for Shiny in Production 2025, to be held on 8th-9th October 2025 in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. Read on for more details on how to submit your work.

Author: Osheen MacOscar

Published: February 13, 2025.

This is part one of a multiple part blog series, in which I will be demonstrating how to create inline visualisations using the {sparkline} R package.

Author: Tim Brock

Published: January 30, 2025.

This post, Part 2 in a series of two, looks at styling and deploying the Observable Framework app we built in part 1.

Authors: Aida Gjoka, Osheen Macoscar & Tim Brock

Published: January 23, 2025.

The fourth instalment of Shiny in Production is back this October, hosted at the Catalyst in Newcastle upon Tyne, with super early bird tickets deadline for Shiny in Production ends on the 31st of January.

Author: Tim Brock

Published: January 16, 2025.

This post, Part 1 in a series of two, looks at porting the functional code of a Shiny app - written in R - into JavaScript code to be used in an Observable Framework application.

Authors: Amieroh Abrahams & Osheen MacOscar

Published: December 24, 2024.

In this short Christmassy blog we will show you how to use {ggplot2}, {sf} and {gganimate} to create a festive animation of a sparkling Christmas tree.

Author: Russ Hyde

Published: December 19, 2024.

Here, we’ll talk about music in R, what packages are available, how to represent musical notation, and what people are actually doing with music data in R.

Authors: Colin Gillespie & Myles Mitchell

Published: December 12, 2024.

The latest version of Posit Package Manager allows us to add metadata to package pages. This means we can now directly link R and Python packages to diffify.com!

Author: Theo Roe

Published: December 5, 2024.

Positron is the new beta Data Science IDE from Posit. Though Posit have stressed that maintenance and development of RStudio will continue, I want to use this blog to explore if Positron is worth the switch.

Author: Heather Turner

Published: November 14, 2024.

This year Shiny in Production hosted an "R Dev Day" split over the two days before the pre-conference workshops. R Dev Days are a new initiative of the R Contribution Working Group, providing an opportunity for R developers to get involved in contributing to the R Project. R Dev Day will be back at SIP 2025, so read on to find out what participants got up to and consider coming along next year!

Author: Osheen MacOscar

Published: November 7, 2024.

All of our public training courses for the first half of 2025 are now available to book! Head over to our public training webpage to book in and start building your programming skills in the new year! In this blog, we list all of our upcoming courses with a description, bookable dates, course level and a link to find out more.

Author: Myles Mitchell

Published: October 31, 2024.

Part 3 in our series of blogs on vetiver for MLOps. Having previously introduced the modelling and deployment steps of the MLOps workflow, we now consider the maintenance of a model in production. The monitoring process involves adding a date column to our data, scoring our model at regular time intervals, and checking for signs of model drift over time as the data evolves.

Authors: Myles Mitchell, Russ Hyde & Keith Newman

Published: October 17, 2024.

The 9th and 10th of October saw the third Shiny in Production conference hosted by Jumping Rivers. Here we share the highlights from our fabulous talks and workshops.

Author: Aida Gjoka

Published: September 5, 2024.

Programming is a craft, and in data science we often spend countless hours coding. Software testing can improve the quality of the code you write as a data scientist. Here, we introduce the pytest framework and show how it can be used to test Python functions.

Author: Clarissa Barratt

Published: August 8, 2024.

We are pleased to announce the full line-up for this year's Shiny in Production conference! In this blog post, we've pulled together all of the talk abstracts to give you a full view of what to expect!

Author: Clarissa Barratt

Published: July 4, 2024.

The details of all of our workshops for Shiny in Production are now live on the conference website. Read on for full details all in one place.

Authors: Tim Brock, Colin Gillespie & the Jumping Rivers Team

Published: June 27, 2024.

R has come a long way since it's initial public release in August 1993. Explore some highlights of the last thirty years in an interactive timeline.

Author: Colin Gillespie

Published: June 20, 2024.

Part 2 of our series of blogs on vetiver for MLOps. In this post, we demonstrate how to deploy a machine learning model to production using Docker, Posit Connect, and SageMaker. Docker allows developers to bundle application code with necessary dependencies, simplifying deployment. We outline the process of creating a Dockerfile with the {vetiver} package and running the model locally. Additionally, we show how to publish the model to Posit Connect and SageMaker for broader accessibility.

Author: Colin Gillespie

Published: June 13, 2024.

Part 1 of our series of blogs on vetiver for MLOps. This post introduces MLOps and its integration into the traditional data science workflow, focusing on continuous model deployment and maintenance. It demonstrates automating data importation, creating a model with {tidymodels}, and using {vetiver} to store and deploy the model. The process includes creating an API with {plumber} and deploying it locally. Finally, it verifies the API functionality, setting the stage for future production deployments. description: Part 1 of our series of blogs on vetiver for MLOps. This post introduces MLOps and its integration into the traditional data science workflow, focusing on continuous model deployment and maintenance. It demonstrates automating data importation, creating a model with {tidymodels}, and using {vetiver} to store and deploy the model. The process includes creating an API with {plumber} and deploying it locally. Finally, it verifies the API functionality, setting the stage for future production deployments.

Author: Clarissa Barratt

Published: June 6, 2024.

Our courses for the second half of 2024 have now been released. We have everything from the very basics of R and Python for data science, to advanced statistical modelling and machine learning. Interested in dashboards and reporting? We have courses on reporting with Quarto, as well as both introductory and advanced Shiny.

Author: Clarissa Barratt

Published: May 30, 2024.

We are excited to announce the Call for Abstracts for Shiny in Production 2024, to be held on 9th-10th October 2024 in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. Read on for more details on how to submit your work.

Author: Clarissa Barratt

Published: May 9, 2024.

We wanted to say a huge thank you to everybody who attended SatRdays London 2024! It was brilliant to see you all there, and we hope you enjoyed the day as much as we did.

Author: Russ Hyde

Published: April 25, 2024.

R 4.4.0 introduces some cool features (one of which is experimental) and makes one of our favourite {rlang} operators available in base R.

Author: Clarissa Barratt

Published: April 12, 2024.

Registration for SatRdays London 2024 is closing soon! Don't miss out on this excellent opportunity to expand your R knowledge and network with other R enthusiasts. Read on for a reminder of what to expect.

Author: Rhian Davies

Published: April 4, 2024.

Reading in large spatial data can sometimes be a pain. Here are some simple things to consider when working in spatial data in R and tips for breaking large data sets into more manageable chunks.

Author: Clarissa Barratt

Published: March 19, 2024.

SatRdays London is fast approaching and we wouldn't be able to put it on without the support of our sponsors!

Author: Rhian Davies

Published: March 7, 2024.

Give your R packages a spring clean with these helper functions from the usethis package.

Authors: Rhian Davies & Keith Newman

Published: February 29, 2024.

Conferences present a great opportunity to meet other professionals working in your field and lay the foundations for future collaborations. But what should you do if the idea of meeting new people puts you well out of your comfort zone?

Author: Clarissa Barratt

Published: February 27, 2024.

SatRdays London is fast approaching and we are happy to announce our full lineup of speakers for the event! Read on for more info. If you want to join the fun, head over to the conference website to sign up!

Author: Tim Brock

Published: February 15, 2024.

A very quick introduction to the new-look blog and tags pages and the brand new author pages.

Author: Colin Gillespie

Published: February 1, 2024.

A benefit of using the {arrow} package with parquet files is it enables you to work with ridiculously large data sets from the comfort of an R session. In this post we explore the timescales associated with different methods of data storage.

Author: Clarissa Barratt

Published: January 25, 2024.

We're a couple of weeks into 2024, and now that we've all settled back in, we thought it was a good time to let you know what events we have coming up for you this year!

Author: Colin Gillespie

Published: January 18, 2024.

Apache Arrow is a cross-language format for super fast in-memory data. It's designed for efficient analytic operations. In this post, we look at reading and writing data using Arrow and the advantages of the parquet file format.

Author: Colin Gillespie

Published: January 11, 2024.

Shiny applications are easy to set up. However, as they often contain sensitive information, care should be taken. This post discusses standard server headers that can be set to harden your application.

Author: Osheen Macoscar

Published: December 14, 2023.

Inspired by Colin Fay's Shiny in Production 2022 talk, "Destroy All Widgets", this blog post series explores how to use Google Lighthouse to measure the performance of your Shiny apps. The last blog in the Lighthouse series uses Google Lighthouse to see the differences each component has on the app times.

Author: Osheen MacOscar

Published: December 7, 2023.

Inspired by Colin Fay's Shiny in Production 2022 talk, "Destroy All Widgets", this blog post series explores how to use Google Lighthouse to measure the performance of your Shiny apps. In this second post of the series, we show how to use lighthouse to analyse your app's start-up times.

Author: Osheen MacOscar

Published: November 30, 2023.

Inspired by Colin Fay's Shiny in Production 2022 talk, "Destroy All Widgets", this blog post series explores how to use Google Lighthouse to measure the performance of your Shiny apps. In this first post of the series, we show how to run and read Google Lighthouse reports.

Author: Clarissa Barratt

Published: November 28, 2023.

All of our public training courses for the first half of 2024 are now available to book! Head over to the public courses page on our website to book in and start building your programming skills in the new year! In this blog post, we provide a list of all of our upcoming courses with a description, upcoming dates, course level and a link to the page to find out more!

Author: Jack Kennedy

Published: November 23, 2023.

The `theme()` command from {ggplot2} has a lot of arguments. This can be a bit daunting, even for those who are familiar with {ggplot2}! We will walk you through how to modify some aspects of a {ggplot2} theme and give you the confidence to try making your own theme modifications.

Authors: Georgia Atkinson & Myles Mitchell

Published: November 16, 2023.

Hey Barbie! I mean ... hey Python user! Have you ever wished that customising your Python environment could be as easy as trying different outfits on your Barbie? Well turns out it is! With virtual environments, you can create isolated Python projects with different dependencies and versions. Read our Barbie-themed guide to get started!

Author: Clarissa Barratt

Published: November 14, 2023.

SatRdays is returning to London in April 2024! We're excited to welcome you to Bush House again next year. Want to get even more involved? Read on to find out how you can submit an abstract for a talk!

Author: Shane Halloran

Published: November 2, 2023.

Over several weeks, we worked to deploy a data science platform for our client. It is a one-stop platform for data analysis and visualisation. This platform consists of interconnected applications, which are the motor which enables the productivity of the data scientists sitting at the wheel.

Authors: Myles Mitchell, Parisa Gregg, Osheen MacOscar & Rhian Davies

Published: October 19, 2023.

On October 12-13 2023, Jumping Rivers hosted the Shiny in Production conference, delving into all things Shiny! Read on for a rundown of the event highlights.

Author: Georgia Atkinson

Published: October 5, 2023.

Python package managers are essential tools that help developers install, manage, and update external libraries or packages used in Python projects. These packages can contain reusable code, modules, and functions developed by other programmers, making it easier for developers to build applications without reinventing the wheel.

Author: Clarissa Barratt

Published: September 28, 2023.

There's only two weeks left to go until Shiny in Production 2023! The events team are hard at work getting things ready for the day, and we wanted to take this opportunity to say a huge thank you to our event sponsors!

Authors: Parisa Gregg & Myles Mitchell

Published: September 21, 2023.

Jupyter notebooks are a popular tool for data scientists using Python. They allow us to mix together plain text (formatted as Markdown) with Python code. In this post, we will show you how to produce reproducible PDF and HTML reports from a Jupyter notebook using Quarto.

Author: Clarissa Barratt

Published: September 14, 2023.

Our bags are packed, flights are booked, and we're ready to head stateside for posit::conf(2023). We're excited to be sponsoring the event this year, as well as presenting a few talks ourselves.

Author: Clarissa Barratt

Published: September 7, 2023.

We are pleased to announce the full line-up for this year's Shiny in Production conference! In this blog post, we've pulled together all of the talk abstracts and speaker bios, to give you a full view of what to expect!

Author: Jack Kennedy

Published: August 31, 2023.

UFO sightings are a mysterious occurrence! We're going to use Bayesian methods via Stan and R to analyse UFO sighting reports over the past century.

Authors: Clarissa Barratt & Rhian Davies

Published: August 29, 2023.

The Royal Statistical Society International conference is next week and Jumping Rivers are exhibiting at the conference, as well as delivering workshops and talks. The draft program can now be viewed online, so we wanted to let you know where you can find us at the event and some of the other sessions we are looking forward to.

Author: Liam Kalita

Published: August 24, 2023.

Today, we're taking a moment to chat about our recent achievement – becoming ISO certified. Read on to find out more about what ISO 27001 is, why and how we pursued this particular certification and what that means for us, and our clients, going forward.

Author: Amieroh Abrahams

Published: August 17, 2023.

Before you embark on your data science journey, it's crucial to equip yourself with the essential tools for data cleaning and preprocessing. Join us as we explore the vital role that data cleaning and preprocessing play in ensuring the quality and integrity of your datasets.

Author: Clarissa Barratt

Published: July 27, 2023.

The recordings from this year's SatRdays London conference are here! Over the next couple of weeks, we will be releasing the recordings of some of the excellent talks from the conference!

Author: Mandy Norrbo

Published: July 20, 2023.

Learn how to generate multiple reproducible presentations at once using Quarto parameters, so you can generate e.g. one presentation for each year in your data set.

Author: Clarissa Barratt

Published: July 18, 2023.

With the early bird deadline approaching, we thought now would be a great time to tell you a bit more about what to expect at this year's Shiny in Production!

Author: Clarissa Barratt

Published: July 6, 2023.

Earlier this year, two data scientists from Jumping Rivers ran an outreach activity for 14-19 year olds across the UK, in collaboration with the youth charity Speakers for Schools.

Author: Myles Mitchell

Published: July 4, 2023.

Embark on your programming odyssey with our extensive range of courses! Never written a line of code in your life? No stress - we offer a mix of introductory courses for beginners as well as more advanced courses for those looking to expand their knowledge further.

Author: Tim Brock

Published: June 8, 2023.

Browsers have been implementing variations on a JavaScript fullscreen API for over a decade. Unfortunately, for much of that time the APIs varied across browsers. This made actually using it in production somewhat cumbersome. In this blog, we show you how to put parts of your Shiny application into fullscreen with only a few lines of JavaScript.

Author: Clarissa Barratt

Published: June 6, 2023.

This summer, we have public courses to take you all the way from the very basics of R, through to using R for statistical modelling, with some data wrangling and intermediate programming in between. Wherever you are on your R journey, take a look at our upcoming courses to see if we can help you on your way.

Author: Clarissa Barratt

Published: May 25, 2023.

With the planning for this year's Shiny in Production conference well under way, we thought now was a good time for a little recap of what happened last year.

Author: Clarissa Barratt

Published: May 23, 2023.

Just like the world of data science, our ethos is transparency and giving back to the community. We are offering automatic sponsorship for R conferences. All the organisers have to do is complete a quick questionnaire and the money is sent on it’s way.

Author: Amieroh Abrahams

Published: May 18, 2023.

If you've been using Excel for a while, then you've likely entered your comfort zone and remained there. Let's help you make the wise switch to R. In this blog, we will explore the various ways to handle dates in Excel and R.

Author: Clarissa Barratt

Published: May 11, 2023.

SatRdays returned to London last month, with a day packed full of talks from expert speakers across a variety of sectors! We'd like to take this opportunity to say a huge thank you to everybody involved in making the day a success!

Author: Myles Mitchell

Published: May 2, 2023.

It's been just over a year since we introduced the world to diffify, our app for comparing package releases. To celebrate reaching this milestone, we're pleased to announce that an "anniversary update" has just gone live! Read on to learn about the latest changes and some exciting plans in the works…

Author: Mandy Norrbo

Published: April 27, 2023.

Learn how to create a clickable word cloud that you can use as an input to e.g. filter observations displayed in a table, using wordcloud2 in a Shiny app.

Author: Russ Hyde

Published: April 20, 2023.

R v4.3.0 is released on April 21st, 2023, and continuing a recent theme, R is getting stricter with your code. If you don't know your `&` from your `&&` you may be in for a bumpy ride. Here, we discuss the changes to the logical comparison operators and a few other new features.

Author: Amieroh Abrahams

Published: April 13, 2023.

If you've been using Excel to create plots from your data for a while, you may have got to a point where you want more customisation options, or reproducibility. In this post, we discuss the differences between creating plots in Excel and using ggplot2 in R!

Author: Clarissa Barratt

Published: April 11, 2023.

We’re delighted to announce that we’ve been named a Finalist in the British Data Awards 2023. Read on to find out more about the awards, and the categories in which we are finalists!

Author: Clarissa Barratt

Published: April 6, 2023.

SatRdays London is fast approaching, and we have a couple of exciting announcements to share with you! Read on to find out more.

Author: Tim Brock

Published: March 30, 2023.

Tooltips in interactive graphics provide a means of giving the user precise details about particular features of the underlying dataset. Using some simple CSS, this post explores how tweaking the design of tooltips can improve the user's experience.

Author: Clarissa Barratt

Published: March 28, 2023.

On 22nd April 2023 we will be hosting SatRdays London, an inclusive, low cost event, which gives R users an opportunity to network and learn from other experts across sectors. In a recent blog post, we introduced all of the speakers for the event! This week, it's the sponsors turn.

Author: Nicola Rennie

Published: March 23, 2023.

Alt text is text that describes the appearance and purpose of an image. This blog post will show you how to include alt text in your web applications and documents when you've built them in R.

Author: Mandy Norrbo

Published: March 16, 2023.

Sometimes you want to go beyond the default {shinydashboard} theme. This blog will take you through 3 options—built-in colours, the {fresh} package, and CSS.

Author: Theo Roe

Published: March 9, 2023.

In this blog, we'll discuss the Network Error Logging header from W3C. It's a feature of most browsers that lets a website / application opt in to receive reports about failed network fetches from the browser.

Author: Clarissa Barratt

Published: March 7, 2023.

SatRdays London is fast approaching, and we are happy to announce our full lineup of speakers for the event! Read on for more info. If you want to join the fun, head over to the conference website to sign up!

Author: Theo Roe

Published: March 2, 2023.

Content Security Policy (CSP) is a framework of modern (ish) browsers used to give applications an extra layer of security - safeguarding against attacks such as cross-site scripting. In this blog, we aim to introduce the concept of Content Security Policy and teach some of the technical aspects.

Author: Amieroh Abrahams

Published: February 23, 2023.

Are you an Excel user who's considering switching over to using R? In this blog we'll use both to compare common data wrangling steps.

Author: Clarissa Barratt

Published: February 21, 2023.

Shiny in Production is returning to the Catalyst this October! Our workshop lineup has now been finalised, and our first two speakers are confirmed. Read on to find out more.

Author: Keith Newman

Published: February 16, 2023.

By automating a few tasks using continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines, developers at Jumping Rivers spent less time on the trivial and repetitive tasks, and more time making improvements where it really mattered.

Author: Jack Kennedy

Published: February 9, 2023.

You've heard about Stan and want to learn a little more. Or maybe you're about to step into the Bayesian paradigm and don't know where to start. In this post, we'll take a look what you can do with Stan and draw comparisons to JAGS.

Author: Clarissa Barratt

Published: February 7, 2023.

We have a great list of online public training courses coming up over the next two months! Read on for a taste of what's in store, or head over to our training page for full details and to book!

Authors: Parisa Gregg & Myles Mitchell

Published: February 2, 2023.

As data scientists we often need to communicate conclusions drawn from data. Additionally, as more data is collected, our reports invariably need updating. In this blog post we will look at how Quarto allows us to weave together text and Python code to generate automated reports.

Author: Tim Brock

Published: January 26, 2023.

This post covers the "why?" and "how?" of making Shiny applications feel like they respond instantaneously to users' interactions.

Author: Clarissa Barratt

Published: January 24, 2023.

At Jumping Rivers we're all about getting involved in the R community! As such, we host multiple events throughout the year. Read on for information about what we have planned so far for 2023!

Author: Russ Hyde

Published: January 19, 2023.

It pays to extract out some helper functions and / or classes from your test cases. By doing so, your tests will look simpler, the behaviour that you are testing will be more explicit, and you'll have less code to maintain.

Author: Russ Hyde

Published: January 12, 2023.

Here, we will write a simple shiny app (as an R package) and show how to generate tests for this app using {shinytest2}.

Author: Clarissa Barratt

Published: January 11, 2023.

SatRdays is returning to London this April! SatRdays are low-cost R conferences, hosted on Saturdays to enable those who usually cannot attend to take part.

Author: Russ Hyde

Published: January 5, 2023.

Automated testing is an essential part of any production-quality software project. Much of the focus in the R world is on testing the individual components of a project, but for those working with {shiny} there are great tools that can test your application as if a user was interacting with it. In this blog series, we focus on {shinytest2}.

Author: Clarissa Barratt

Published: December 20, 2022.

If you're thinking of picking up a new skill in the new year, take a look at our upcoming public training courses! We have plenty of introductory courses coming up, both online and in-person, so you can hit the ground running after the holidays!

Author: Nicola Rennie

Published: December 15, 2022.

Unlike other programming languages, there isn't currently a dominant approach to OOP in R. Here's a brief overview of the new S7 package that aims to change that.

Authors: Nicola Rennie & Colin Gillespie

Published: December 8, 2022.

Are you an R user considering switching from R Markdown to Quarto? Here are our favourite features that we think R users might benefit from.

Author: Clarissa Barratt

Published: December 6, 2022.

Over the last two weeks, we have been releasing the recordings of the talks from our Shiny in Production conference! Read on to take a look for yourself!

Author: Astrid Radermacher

Published: December 1, 2022.

Data science and data engineering are incredibly cognitively demanding professions. As data professionals, we are required to leverage both our analytical/engineering skills and our interpersonal skills to be effective contributors within our organisations. In this blog, we discuss why this combination could reasonably count as an occupational hazard.

Author: Rachel Binks

Published: November 24, 2022.

Recently I came across a situation where I had to use Microsoft Excel for a project. In this blog post I discuss some of the things I found surprisingly difficult when learning Excel as an R user.

Author: Osheen MacOscar

Published: November 17, 2022.

Tableau Public is a free platform which allows you to upload data, create visualisations and publish them for the community to see. In this blog you will learn how easy it is to get started and how intuitive it is to use.

Author: Myles Mitchell

Published: November 15, 2022.

We are excited to finally release Python content on Diffify! You can now perform version comparisons for 1600 popular PyPI packages. Read on to learn about the new content, and our plans to expand this as we look to the future.

Author: Parisa Gregg

Published: November 10, 2022.

When creating graphs for a report or publication we usually want to ensure they follow a certain style. In this blog post we will look at formatting and colourmap customisation in the popular Matplotlib library.

Published: November 3, 2022.

The arrival of Shiny for Python was announced at the RStudio Conference a few weeks ago. In this tutorial I will take you through how I created a simple Shiny for Python dashboard, with no experience using the framework in R.

Author: Mandy Norrbo

Published: October 27, 2022.

There are an increasing number of open-source "add-on" packages that extend both the front end and the back end functionality of Shiny. This blog will highlight 5 UI add-on packages that can massively improve your user experience and also just add a bit of flair to your app.

Authors: Jamie Owen & Colin Gillespie

Published: October 20, 2022.

Deploying shiny applications can be frustrating, making sure your production environment matches your local environment where you can see your application running. In this blog post we explore how we might start writing code to automate the process of creating Dockerfiles for producing images that make our local, running, shiny application able to be deployed in a container.

Author: Clarissa Barratt

Published: October 18, 2022.

Here at Jumping Rivers we like to keep our courses up to date so we can bring you training on the latest tools and technologies. To this end, we have recently added two new courses to our listing!

Authors: Nicola Rennie, Rhian Davies, Jack Walton & Mandy Norrbo

Published: October 13, 2022.

On October 6-7 2022, Jumping Rivers hosted the Shiny in Production conference! The conference delved into the world of {shiny} and other web based R packages.

Author: Rhian Davies

Published: October 6, 2022.

Have you ever inherited a pile of messy code? Or perhaps you wrote some code a long time ago and it needs some TLC? Here are our tips for refactoring messy code.

Author: Clarissa Barratt

Published: October 4, 2022.

Shiny in Production is just around the corner and we can't wait to see you all there! Read on for more on what we have in store!

Author: Jamie Owen

Published: September 29, 2022.

Unit testing is an integral part of creating robust applications and codebases. Continuing the API as a package series we explore how you might set up unit tests with {testthat} for your API service.

Author: Jamie Owen

Published: September 22, 2022.

Logging is crucial to understanding what's going on with an application as it runs. There are some good solutions to logging of R shiny applications but less so for plumber applications. Continuing the API as a package series we examine how you might add some automatic logging to your API service written in R using plumber and the logger package.

Author: Clarissa Barratt

Published: September 20, 2022.

It will come as no great surprise that here at Jumping Rivers, we are huge advocates for learning data skills. There are many benefits to learning at least some basic data skills, even if you don't work explicitly with data.

Author: Jamie Owen

Published: September 15, 2022.

Inspired by opinionated packages on {shiny} app development such as {golem} and {leprechaun}, Jumping Rivers adopted a similar pattern for producing a {plumber} API as a package for one of our client projects. This is one of a series of blog posts discussing the general structure of said package.

Author: Parisa Gregg

Published: September 8, 2022.

In this installment of our series on deploying to RStudio Connect we take a look at Streamlit. Streamlit enables quick and easy creation of web applications for machine learning and data science. We will go through a simple app and how to deploy it.

Author: Nicola Rennie

Published: September 6, 2022.

Jumping Rivers are exhibiting at the RSS International Conference 2022, and we'll delivering workshops and talks as well. These are a couple of the sessions we're looking forward to the most!

Author: Parisa Gregg

Published: September 1, 2022.

Next up in our blog post series on deploying Python APIs to RStudio Connect is FastAPI. FastAPI is a high-performance web framework for building APIs with Python. Read on to see how you can deploy your FastAPI apps with RStudio Connect!

Author: Parisa Gregg

Published: August 25, 2022.

RStudio Connect (soon to be Posit Connect) is a platform that provides the ability to deploy and share R applications and reports. However, it is not just for R developers (hence the name change). RStudio Connect also supports many Python applications, including Flask. In this blog we will look at how to deploy a Flask app to RStudio Connect.

Author: Jamie Owen

Published: August 23, 2022.

RStudio conf 2022 had some exciting reveals. Certainly one of the most interesting releases was that of shiny, the excellent web application development framework known in the R community, getting a Python release. Here we will take a first look at creating a simple application.

Authors: Myles Mitchell & Parisa Gregg

Published: August 18, 2022.

Roll up, roll up! Most R packages contain a NEWS file which documents the changes between each release. However, there is no definitive convention for how to format this file. In this post we will share some top tips for writing NEWS files, so that by the end you will be able to tell “good” NEWS from “fake” NEWS!

Author: Nicola Rennie

Published: August 11, 2022.

July 25 - 28 2022 saw thousands of people attend rstudio::conf(2022) from all over the world, including a few of us from Jumping Rivers. Here's a recap of the big news, and a few of our personal highlights from the conference!

Authors: Myles Mitchell & Clarissa Barratt

Published: August 9, 2022.

What a few months it's been for Diffify, our new app for comparing package releases! We’ve been delighted with the enthusiastic response and quick adoption by the R community. Read on to learn about just some of many updates we’ve made to the app since launch day, and how we are actively addressing your feedback as we look to the future.

Author: Tim Brock

Published: August 4, 2022.

This article looks at how we added new themes to diffify.com to make the site more accessible to users with visual impairments and the tools we used to check the suitability of our new themes.

Author: Tim Brock

Published: July 28, 2022.

In this post we'll look at low contrast sensitivity and colour vision deficiencies and why we wanted to make changes to diffify.com to make it more accessible to users with these conditions.

Authors: Colin Gillespie & Nicola Rennie

Published: July 26, 2022.

rstudio::conf(2022) is well underway and, after two days of workshops, the main talks begin tomorrow. Here are our highlights of talks we're most excited about!

Author: Liam Kalita

Published: July 21, 2022.

RStudio Connect supports a spectrum of data products, static or dynamic, developed in R and Python: Dashboards, applications, APIs, reports, and much more - we can also host ReactJS applications! This series will focus on recreating a Shiny App tutorial using ReactJS. In part 3 will demonstrate how to host an application on RStudio Connect.

Author: Liam Kalita

Published: July 14, 2022.

RStudio Connect supports a spectrum of data products, static or dynamic, developed in R and Python: Dashboards, applications, APIs, reports, and much more - we can also host ReactJS applications! This series will focus on recreating a Shiny App tutorial using ReactJS. In part 2, we will walk through an example.

Author: Clarissa Barratt

Published: July 12, 2022.

At Jumping Rivers, we love data science! Surprised? Didn't think so ... But, did you know that as well as providing training and consultancy, we also like to get involved with the data science community!

Author: Liam Kalita

Published: July 7, 2022.

RStudio Connect supports a spectrum of data products, static or dynamic, developed in R and Python: Dashboards, applications, APIs, reports, and much more - we can also host ReactJS applications! This series will focus on recreating a Shiny App tutorial using ReactJS. In part 1, we introduce the required concepts and technologies.

Author: Sebastian Mellor

Published: June 30, 2022.

RStudio Workbench provides a development environment for R, Python, and many other languages. When developing a performant web application you may progress from Shiny towards tools like Plumber. As a Shiny developer, one popular front-end library you might already be familiar with is React.

Author: Clarissa Barratt

Published: June 28, 2022.

If you're based in the North East of England and you're looking for a place to discuss all things data science with like-minded people, then you might want to check out the North East Data Scientist (NEDS) Meetups!

Author: Nicola Rennie

Published: June 23, 2022.

Choosing which colours to use in a plot is an important design decision. This blog post will show you how to make a custom colour palette that is compatible with {ggplot2}.

Author: Russ Hyde

Published: June 21, 2022.

The great strength of Shiny is that it simplifies the production of data-focused web applications, making it relatively easy to present data to users / clients in an interactive way. However, data can be big and data-processing can be complex, time-consuming and memory-hungry. In this post we demonstrate how we tackled this issue in a recent project.

Author: Georgia Atkinson

Published: June 16, 2022.

In this post we will go through an example of how to build a simple web application to display data in various forms including plots, tables and graphics using H2O Wave, an easy web application development tool in Python.

Author: Clarissa Barratt

Published: June 14, 2022.

The organisation for Shiny in Production is well under way - our list of speakers is now up on the conference website, and registration is open, with Early Bird tickets available until July 31st! Read on for more details.

Author: Georgia Atkinson

Published: June 9, 2022.

H2O.ai is a company which develops products for easy, scalable, machine learning and artificial intelligence. This post will talk through who H2O.ai are and what software they provide for your machine learning needs.

Author: Clarissa Barratt

Published: June 7, 2022.

The trainers here at Jumping Rivers have been busy developing a host of new courses for your programming pleasure! We have recently developed several new courses, which are now available to view on our course list.

Authors: Colin Gillespie & Jack Walton

Published: May 31, 2022.

Complex software bugs are often difficult to reproduce. Unfortunately, without this reproducibility it can be hard to get help and input from others. In this post we discuss a particularly nasty bug we encountered and how we made it reproducible.

Authors: Parisa Gregg & Myles Mitchell

Published: May 26, 2022.

Have you ever wished your code could be as stylish as you? Linting is a process which helps ensure the format and style of your code adheres to best coding practices. Read on to learn about linters and auto-formatters, and start adding some PEP to your Python!

Author: Jamie Owen

Published: May 19, 2022.

Web content accessibility is an important topic to consider when building web based applications. {shiny} is an excellent tool that allows data practitioners a relatively simple, quick approach to providing an intuitive user interface to their R code via a web application. Here we explore accessibility in the context of a {shiny} application.

Authors: Clarissa Barratt & Nicola Rennie

Published: May 13, 2022.

This October, Jumping Rivers will be holding our Shiny in Production conference! Hosted in the centre of Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK, this conference will delve into the world of {shiny} and other web based R packages.

Author: Jamie Owen

Published: May 12, 2022.

The web is an increasingly critical resource for many aspects of life. Striving to make your content accessible is essential to provide equal opportunity and access for all.

Author: James Salsbury

Published: May 5, 2022.

All food establishments in England & Wales have a Food Hygiene Rating. A value of 0 suggests this is a place to avoid, whereas a value of 5 gives you confidence in the restaurant. In this post, we show that (sadly) hyigene ratings are linked to deprivation.

Authors: Clarissa Barratt & Parisa Gregg

Published: April 29, 2022.

Welcome to Diffify, the tool that provides you with a comparison between different versions of any R package stored on the CRAN repositories.

Author: Clarissa Barratt

Published: April 8, 2022.

The daffodils are out, the sun is shining(ish), spring is in the air! And that means that it’s time to start planning for the conference season.

Author: Colin Gillespie

Published: April 1, 2022.

R version 4.2.0 is about to be released. This release includes an update to the native pipe, changes to logical operators and improvements to the help page. In this blog post, we take a look at (some of) these new features. Highlighting (in our opinion) the most exciting changes.

Author: Clarissa Barratt

Published: March 21, 2022.

When starting out for a PhD, we all think (or at least wish) that we are going to make a paradigm shifting discovery. Unfortunately, this is usually not the case, but it has been known to happen.

Author: Colin Gillespie

Published: January 25, 2022.

R 4.0 was released almost two years ago. However, the majority of R users didn't immediately adopt the new version due to obvious constraints when updating software. The consequence is that many of the new and useful features are forgotten about. This post highlights the features as we've moved to R 4.0.

Author: Nicola Rennie

Published: December 21, 2021.

Creating 30 maps for the 30 Day Map Challenge in November 2021 was indeed a challenge, but over the course of the month I developed a process for approaching the problem. This blog post will focus on the thought process behind creating maps rather than the technical aspects of writing the code.

Author: Nicola Rennie

Published: December 15, 2021.

In line with the continuous growth at Jumping Rivers, we are looking to expand our team of dedicated professionals working in our teams. If you are enthusiastic and keen to develop your skills in cutting edge data science disciplines or infrastructure please read on!

Author: Osheen Macoscar

Published: October 22, 2021.

Our annual training review is back! Like many other training providers, we had to pivot to online learning in 2020, which brought with it challenges but also new opportunities. The review will show you what the year looked like for our trainers and training course attendees, including which trainer taught the most courses!

Author: Colin Gillespie

Published: October 19, 2021.

In 2020, GitHub took the correct decision to change the default branch from master to main. For single, independent repositories, this is relatively straightforward. But moving groups or organisations is more complex and requires planning.

Author: Mandy Norrbo

Published: October 12, 2021.

Learning D3.js can be pretty overwhelming as an R user. Luckily, the {r2d2} package lets you keep your data cleaning steps in R and easily incorporate any visualisation in R Markdown reports and R Shiny dashboards. This tutorial-style blog will take you through creating your first D3 visualisation with a bit of Scooby-Doo along the way.

Author: Colin Gillespie

Published: September 27, 2021.

Apache Parquet is a column storage file format used by many Hadoop systems. This post describes what Parquet is and the tricks it uses to minimise file size. We also discuss how to use Parquet, within an R workflow.

Author: Colin Gillespie

Published: July 19, 2021.

Bridging the gap between data science and IT teams is much easier than you might expect! This two-part webinar will discuss why open source languages are suitable for enterprise data science, and how data scientists can work with the IT team to get their organisational buy-in.

Author: Mandy Norrbo

Published: July 13, 2021.

Forking repositories is a great way to learn from and contribute to others' code. However, you may quickly end up with a cluttered user space, with old forks lingering around. Manually removing repositories is slow and tedious. Read more to find out how you can use the {gh} package to speed up the process.

Author: John McIntyre

Published: June 1, 2021.

In line with the continuous growth at Jumping Rivers, we are looking to expand our team of dedicated professionals working in our teams. If you are enthusiatic and keen to develop your skills in cutting edge data science discliplines or infrastructure please read on!

Author: John McIntyre

Published: May 18, 2021.

Good news! We have updated our public course page with our new programme of courses, being delivered between May and November. Early bird offers & academic discounts currently available.

Author: Russ Hyde

Published: May 17, 2021.

A new R release (v 4.1.0) is due for release on 18th May 2021. This version brings in a few exciting features, such as anonymous functions and the native pipe. Here, we summarise these and other notable changes.

Author: Colin Gillespie

Published: March 29, 2021.

Moving your website to Hugo brings a lot of benefits, but there are also challenges. In this post, we'll discuss our top tips for making that move to Hugo as smooth as possible.

Author: Colin Gillespie

Published: March 12, 2021.

Having consistent {knitr} options and hook, improves reproducibility and reduces errors. This post provides a set of standard {knitr} chunk arguments to simplify workflows and make consistent graphs.

Published: March 12, 2021.

We are expanding the Jumping Rivers team. If you know {shiny} then this could be the perfect role for you!

Author: Colin Gillespie

Published: February 23, 2021.

Adding images with {knitr} is straightforward; we simply use include_graphics(). However, it is easy to add an image that is too large, or has the wrong dimensions. This post tells you what to watch out for, and how to optimise your images for the web.

Author: Colin Gillespie

Published: February 19, 2021.

When including graphics within a markdown document, it's crucial to use the correct file type from generating graphics. However, there isn't one size fits all, instead, we should choose what's most appropriate for the image.

Author: Colin Gillespie

Published: February 15, 2021.

Setting the correct images sizes in an R markdown document, can be tricky. There are a number of different arguments that all interact with each other. In this post, we look at how we should create the correct image sizes using {knitr}.

Published: February 7, 2021.

"If you've been using R for a while, you've likely accumulated a hodgepodge of useful code along the way. While you might be tempted to keep the code in a set of disparate file, this quickly becomes unmaintainable. Instead, you should consider placing the code in a personal R package."

Published: November 25, 2020.

We love supporting the community around the open source tools that we use on a daily basis. In the past, Jumping Rivers has helped useR user groups and SatRdays events to happen by enabling frictionless sponsorship for European groups. We believe that it is our duty to help grow the community that helps us.

Published: October 16, 2020.

For the last few years we’ve offered automatic sponsorship for meet-ups and satRday events. However for obvious COVID related reasons, most (all?) meet-ups have meeting getting together virtually, so the need for extra Pizza money has diminished. As with most organisations, we’ve had to adapted to the new online-first environment.

Published: October 13, 2020.

Don’t we all miss 2019 (blame Covid for the long delay in this post). The days of going to work and seeing your work colleagues face to face - and for some of you, attending one of our on-site training courses! 2019 was a great year for us.

Author: Colin Gillespie

Published: August 28, 2020.

One of our main roles at Jumping Rivers is to set-up and provide ongoing maintenance to R, Python and RStudio infrastructure. This typically involves ensuring software is up-to-date and making sure everything is running smoothly. The {oysteR} package is an R interface to the OSS Index that allows users to scan their installed R packages.

Published: August 14, 2020.

Jumping Rivers is a data science consultancy company focused on R and Python. We work across industries and throughout the world. We offer a mixture of training, modelling, and infrastructure support. Jumping Rivers is an RStudio Full Service Certified Partner.

Author: Colin Gillespie

Published: June 25, 2020.

Continuous integration is an amazing tool when developing R packages. We push a change to the server, and a process is spawned that checks we haven’t done something silly. It protects us from ourselves! However this process can become slow, as typically the CI process starts with a blank virtual machine (VM).

Published: April 21, 2020.

So RStudio Connect has embraced Python and now runs Flask applications! At Jumping Rivers we make a lot of use of R, shiny, and Python for creating visual tools for our clients. Shiny has a lot of nice features, in particular it is very fast for prototyping web applications.

Author: Colin Gillespie

Published: April 15, 2020.

In our recent post about saving R graphics, it became obvious that achieving consistent graphics across platforms or even saving the “correct” graph on a particular OS was challenging. Getting consistent fonts across platforms often failed, and for the default PNG device under Windows, anti-aliasing was also an issue.

Author: Colin Gillespie

Published: April 14, 2020.

R is known for it’s amazing graphics. Not only {ggplot2}, but also {plotly}, and the other dozens of packages at the graphics task view. There seems to be a graph for every scenario. However once you’ve created your figure, how do you export it? This post compares standard methods for exporting R plots as PNGs/PDFs across different OSs.

Author: Aoife Curran

Published: March 26, 2020.

Written by Aoife Curran. The purpose of this post isn’t to add new insight into the spread of the coronavirus - there are plenty of experts out there more qualified. Instead, our goal is to highlight how to construct simple, interactive visualisations using live data such as:

Published: March 23, 2020.

Every few weeks or so, a tweet pops up asking about how to speed up package installation in R. Depending on the luck of twitter, the author may get a few suggestions. The bigger picture is that package installation time is starting to become more of an issue for a number of reasons.

Published: March 16, 2020.

Hey there! Here at Jumping Rivers, we have the capabilities to teach you R, Python & Git virtually. For the last three years we have been running online training courses for small groups (and even 1 to 1). How Is It Different To An In-Person Course? It’s the same, but also different!

Published: March 4, 2020.

We are very pleased to announce, as you might already be aware, that SatRday is coming back to Newcastle upon Tyne on 4th April 2020. SatRdays are one-day, non-profit, community organised R conferences held across the world. The event will be held at The Catalyst - right next to St James’ Park.

Published: January 27, 2020.

When talking about languages to use in Production in data science, R is usually not part of the conversation and if it is, it’s referenced as a secondary language.

Author: Colin Gillespie

Published: January 17, 2020.

Every time R starts, it runs through a couple of R scripts. One of these scripts is the .Rprofile. This allows users to customise their particular set-up. However, some care has to be taken, as if this script is broken, this can cause R to break. If this happens, just delete the script!

Published: December 11, 2019.

Operators you should make more use of in R. Only recently have I discovered the true power of some the operators in R. Here are some tips on some underused operators in R: The %In% Operator. This funny looking operator is very handy. It’s short for testing if several values appear in an object.

Published: December 8, 2019.

Jumping Rivers are coming to San Francisco in January 2020! We’ll be running a number of R training courses with Paradigm Data. You can find the booking links and more details over at our courses page. Don’t be afraid to get in contact if you have any questions!

Published: December 5, 2019.

Before we start anything, I’d like to mention that most of the hard work came from nsaunders and his great blog post Idle thoughts lead to R internals: how to count function arguments. Let’s get started. The aim of this blog is to capture the number of arguments present in each function with packages of the {tidyverse}.

Published: December 5, 2019.

SatRdays are great. Low cost R events, held around the world. What’s not to love! For the last year, we have been offering automatic sponsorship for all SatRday events. All the organisers have to do is complete a quick questionnaire and the money is sent on it’s way. So far we have sponsored seven events!

Published: October 17, 2019.

Jumping Rivers is a data science consultancy company focused on R and Python. We work across industries and throughout the world. We offer a mixture of training, modelling, and infrastructure support. Jumping Rivers is an Posit Full Service Certified Partner.

Published: September 9, 2019.

At Jumping Rivers we’re always to want to branch into the data science community, and so this year we’re going to quite a few conferences in the autumn. You can catch us at: GSS (Government Statistical Service) Conference - Edinburgh.

Published: August 16, 2019.

Big news. RStudio recently started certifying trainers in three areas: the tidyverse, Shiny and teaching. To be certified to teach a topic you have to pass the exam for that topic and the teaching exam. Even bigger news. Four of your lovely Jumping Rivers trainers are now certified to teach at least one topic!

Published: August 4, 2019.

You’ll be pleased to know that Jumping rivers are running R training courses up and down the UK, in London, Newcastle, Belfast and Edinburgh. I’ve put together a quick summary of the courses available through til the end of the year. They are sorted by place then date.

Author: Colin Gillespie

Published: May 21, 2019.

This blog post has two goals. Investigate the {bench} package for timing R functions. Consequently explore the different algorithms in the {digest} package using {bench}. What Is {Digest}? The {digest} package provides a hash function to summarise R objects.

Published: May 15, 2019.

Earlier this month I attended the inaugural SatRday Newcastle. This was my first time attending a SatRday event, and I had a really enjoyable day. The event was sponsored by Newcastle University, Sage, RStudio and Jumping Rivers. There were over 100 attendees from across the U.K.

Author: Colin Gillespie

Published: February 4, 2019.

One of the great things about R, is the myriad of packages. Packages are typically installed via CRAN, Bioconductor and GitHub. But how often do we think about what we are installing? Do we pay attention or just install when something looks neat? Do we think about security or just take it that everything is secure?

Author: Colin Gillespie

Published: January 29, 2019.

When discussing how to speed up slow R code, my first question is what is your computer spec? It’s always surprised me that people are wondering why analysing big data is slow, yet they are using a five-year-old cheap laptop. Spending a few thousand pounds would often make their problems disappear.

Published: January 28, 2019.

Jumping Rivers is a data science company based in Newcastle. We are not sector based and our clients range through all industries. We are looking for individuals who enjoy a challenge. Main Duties Technical Duties: Provide technical training, Development of bespoke statistical algorithms, Building web applications using R and Shiny, Data analysis using R and/or Python.

Published: January 25, 2019.

Last year we gave you a price break down of some of the most popular R conferences around the globe for 2017. We’re going to do it again for 2018. Remember, you can get up-to-date information on upcoming conferences via our GitHub page. It’s important to note that these costs are the prices of an industry ticket for the conference only.

Published: January 25, 2019.

We are pleased to announce the very first Satrday event in Newcastle upon Tyne (and England). satRdays Newcastle is a one-day, low-cost, community organised R conference in the heart of Newcastle City Centre. Where? The event will be held at Newcastle University.

Author: Colin Gillespie

Published: November 19, 2018.

Domain squatting or URL hijacking is a straightforward attack that requires little skill. An attacker registers a domain that is similar to the target domain and hopes that a user accidentally visits the site. For example, if the domain is example.com, then a typo-squatter would register similar domains such as

Author: Colin Gillespie

Published: November 1, 2018.

At Jumping Rivers we run a lot of R courses. Some of our most popular courses revolve around the tidyverse, in particular, our Introduction to the tidyverse and our more advanced mastering course. We even trained over 200 data scientists NHS - see our case study for more details.

Author: Jamie Owen

Published: October 15, 2018.

I love R and I love Shiny. One of the things I really like about shiny is the ease with which you can incorporate other Javascript based tools and libraries. By my own admission, my JavaScript skills are definitely lacking but there are so many cool libraries out there which can really make visualisation and interaction with displayed content come alive.

Author: Colin Gillespie

Published: September 20, 2018.

Last week I spent some time reminiscing about my PhD and looking through some old R code. This trip down memory lane led to some of my old R scripts that amazingly still run. My R scripts were fairly simple and just created a few graphs.

Published: September 2, 2018.

Ever wonder what an evolving gif of each premier league team’s goal difference vs points would look like made in R? Look no further! Most of this is going to be setting up the data (as always) instead of actually plotting the data.

Published: August 29, 2018.

Anyone who has a long commute or who has to travel with work knows the importance of podcasts. Podcasts allow you turn otherwise useless time, into something both productive and interesting. In this blog post, we’ll describe some of our favourite podcasts.

Author: Colin Gillespie

Published: August 21, 2018.

In our previous post, we demonstrated that contrary to popular opinion, it is possible to generate attractive looking plots using just base graphics. Although we did confess, that it did take a lot of time and effort. In this post, we repeat the same exercise.

Published: July 2, 2018.

So it’s here… After lots of entries (147 to be precise), we can finally announce the winner of the WhyR 2018 Competition! But first, we have to tell you quickly about how we picked the winner. How we did it. So it really wasn’t that hard. We held the questionnaire on typeform.

Published: May 22, 2018.

It’s competition time! We’re sponsoring Why R? 2018 Conference. The conference runs from the 2-5th of July in Wroclaw, Poland and us nice folks here at Jumping Rivers are giving away a free ticket to the conference!

Published: May 9, 2018.

Big news, from the 13th till the 27th June Jumping Rivers will be running 6 courses on R in Hamburg!!. It should be noted that each course runs for one day, apart from the Predictive Analytics course, which runs for 2 days. The courses are as follows:

Published: April 20, 2018.

The results of the eRum competition are in! Before we announce the winners we would like to thank everyone who entered. It has been a pleasure to look at all of the ideas on show. The Main Competition. The winner of the main competition is Lukasz Janiszewski.

Published: April 20, 2018.

Well well well, we’ve only gone and won The Water Hub hackathon! Well, joint winners but the main word is WINNER. First of all we want to say thank you to all the guys at the Water Hub and the Sunderland Software Centre for organising and inviting.

Author: Theo Roe

Published: April 12, 2018.

Regular expressions. How they can be cruel! Well we're here to make them a tad easier. To do so we're going to make use of the {stringr} package. We're going to use the str_detect() and str_subset() functions. In particular the latter. str_detect() is used to detect whether a string contains a certain pattern.

Author: Sebastian Mellor

Published: April 11, 2018.

At Jumping Rivers we often collaborate with the local community. This includes attending regional events such as those run by Creative FUSE, a partnership between the North East’s five universities. I recently attended an event at the National Glass Centre called ReCoding the Wall.

Author: Theo Roe

Published: March 28, 2018.

Given that I do quite like twitter, I thought it would be a good idea to right about R’s interface to the twitter API; {rtweet}. As usual, we can grab the package in the usual way. We’re also going to need the {tidyverse} for the analysis, {rvest} for some initial webscraping of twitter names, {lubridate} for some date manipulation and {stringr} for some minor text mining.

Published: February 24, 2018.

During a very quick tour of Edinburgh (and in particular some distilleries), Dave Robinson (Tidytext fame), was able to drop by the Edinburgh R meet-up group to give a very neat talk on tidy text. The first part of the talk set the scene: What does does text mean? Why make text tidy? What sort of problems can you solve?

Published: February 7, 2018.

Hi there! We’re running some courses on R, Python and Tensorflow around the UK that you might be interested in! All courses are spearheaded with lectures by one of our first-class trainers. The lectures are interspersed with practicals and coffee breaks. Attendees get a set of in-depth notes to pair with the lecture.

Published: February 2, 2018.

So… big news. Jumping Rivers is sponsoring eRum 2018 and in light of this news we are giving away a free place at the conference! (Not to mention our very own lead consultant, Colin Gillespie, is one of the invited speakers.) The Main Competition: Here at Jumping Rivers, we maintain the site meetingsR.

Author: Colin Gillespie

Published: February 1, 2018.

Hi all, so given our logo here at Jumping Rivers is a set of lines designed to look like a Gaussian Process, we thought it would be a neat idea to recreate this image in R. To do so we’re going to need a couple packages. We do the usual install.packages() dance (remember this step can be performed in parallel).

Author: Colin Gillespie

Published: January 25, 2018.

Base R graphics get a bad press (although to be fair, they could have chosen their default values better). In general, they are viewed as a throw back to the dawn of the R era. I think that most people would agree that, in general, there are better graphics techniques in R (e.g. {ggplot2}).

Published: January 24, 2018.

This year we had the privilege of sponsoring StanCon. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to actually attend the conference. Rather than let our ticket go to waste, we ran a small competition, which Ignacio Martinez won with his very cool (but in alpha stage) R package.

Published: January 19, 2018.

Jumping Rivers is proud to be sponsoring the upcoming SatRday conference in Cape Town, South Africa on 17th March 2018. What is SatRday? SatRdays are a collection of free/cheap accessible R conferences organised by members of the R community at various locations across the globe.

Author: Theo Roe

Published: January 8, 2018.

Let’s get something straight, there isn’t really any trouble with tibbles. I’m hoping you’ve noticed this is a play on 1967 Star Trek episode, “The Trouble with Tribbles”. I’ve recently got myself a job as a Data Scientist, here, at Jumping Rivers. Having never come across tibbles until this point, I now find myself using them in nearly every R script I compose.

Published: December 18, 2017.

In last weeks post we tantalised you with upcoming R & data science conferences, but from a cost point of view, not all R conferences are the same. Using the R conference site, it’s fairly easy to compare the cost of previous R conferences.

Published: December 12, 2017.

It’s that time of year when we need to start thinking about what R Conferences we would like to (and can!) attend. To help plan your (ahem) work trips, we thought it would be useful to list the upcoming main attractions. We maintain a list of upcoming rstats conferences.

Author: Colin Gillespie

Published: December 2, 2017.

Can’t be bothered reading, tell me now. Host RStudio server on an azure instance. Configure the instance to access RStudio with a nice url. Getting started: Azure is cloud computing framework provided by Microsoft, the same idea as AWS by Amazon.

Published: November 29, 2017.

Today we are happy to announce our Stan contest. Something we feel very strongly at Jumping Rivers is giving back to the community. We have benefited immensely from hard work by numerous people, so when possible, we try to give something back.

Authors: Theo Roe & Colin Gillespie

Published: November 27, 2017.

The {plotly} package. A godsend for interactive documents, dashboard and presentations. For such documents, there is no doubt that anyone would prefer a plot created in {plotly} rather than {ggplot2}. Why? Using {plotly} gives you neat and crucially interactive options at the top, whereas {ggplot2} objects are static.

Published: November 20, 2017.

Stan is freedom-respecting, open-source software for facilitating statistical inference at the frontiers of applied statistics. Or to put it another way, it makes Bayesian inference fast and (a bit) easier.

Author: Theo Roe

Published: November 20, 2017.

As time goes on, your R scripts are probably getting longer and more complicated, right? Timing parts of your script could save you precious time when re-running code over and over again. Today I’m going to go through the 4 main functions for doing so.

Author: Colin Gillespie

Published: November 15, 2017.

Can’t Be Bothered Reading, Tell Me Now. A simple one line tweak can significantly speed up package installation and updates. The Wonder Of CRAN: One of the best features of R is CRAN. When a package is submitted to CRAN, not only is it checked under three versions of R