Shiny in Production 2025: R Dev Day
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. This post will answer questions you may have, such as: “Do I need to be an R guru to participate?”, “What will I be expected to do?”, and “Is there a cost to attend?”. Hopefully by the end, you’ll be motivated to sign up!
What is an R Dev Day?
An R Dev Day is a hands-on collaborative event, where people work in small groups on contributions to base R or to infrastructure that supports such contributions from the community.
What do you mean by base R?
Base R is the colloquial term for everything that comes in the source distribution of R. From a user’s point of view, the main components are the R manuals and 14 packages, including base, datasets, graphics, and stats. This codebase is maintained by the R Core Team with contributions from the wider community.
What do you mean by infrastructure?
In this context, we’re using infrastructure to refer to any documentation or tooling that facilitates or encourages contribution. Some examples are the R Development Guide Quarto book, the R Dev Container containerised development environment, and the Translations Dashboard.
Do I need to be an R guru to participate?
Come as you are! We aim to prepare a range of tasks suitable for people with different skills, so you can find something that matches your knowledge and experience. When you register, you can select the areas that you’re interested in contributing to and let us know if you have particular skills to offer.
Don’t forget, you’ll be working in a small group, so you can benefit from each other’s expertise, and there will be experienced developers on hand to help out!
What will I be expected to do?
Tasks will be prepared in advance on the r-dev-day GitHub repo. You can check out some of the closed issues from past R Dev Days. Typical tasks include:
- Contributing to fixing bugs in base R
- Creating a reproducible example (reprex), e.g., Bug 17148: rasterImage shows incorrect image orientation.
- Debugging an issue to find the root cause, e.g., Bug 17616 - Anomaly with contrast functions.
- Proposing a patch to fix an issue, e.g., making a minor change that has already been suggested, making larger changes to an R function after some analysis, or updating the C code underlying an R function to fix a bug.
- Adding a new section in the R Dev Guide, e.g., Document how to make a feature request.
- Translating messages, errors and warnings via the Weblate online interface.
We aim to prepare tasks where you can make good progress and report back at the end of the event. If you can continue to contribute on an ad-hoc basis after the event, e.g., responding to a review of your contribution or taking on a new task, that is very much appreciated, but we understand if you can’t.
When and where is the R Dev Day?
R Dev Day @ SIP 2025 will take place on the Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday morning, before the Shiny in Production 2025 tutorials. It will be in the same building as the main conference.
Is there a cost to attend?
No! The event is free to attend and open to people who are not attending Shiny in Production 2025. However, R Dev Day @ SIP 2025 participants receive 20% off Shiny in Production 2025 registration and early bird registration for the conference is open till Saturday 9 August, so we encourage you to register for both events while there is space left!
Register for R Dev Day @ SIP 2025
