Last night we had our first event in the newly (re-)launched Charlottesville R Users (CRU) group. We had about 30 or so attendees — about half from academia and half from industry, with a few from local government organizations. A huge thanks to everyone who came out, and a special thanks to the University of Virginia School of Data Science for letting us use their amazing Capital One Hub space for the event.
We started with ~20 minutes of unstructured socializing and networking over pizza, then I kicked things off leading a group discussion with everyone on the group’s goals, scope, and community building & sustainability (slides here).
My long-time friend and colleague VP Nagraj gave a great talk on practical R packaging with Docker using the pracpac package (GitHub, CRAN, arXiv).
I wrapped up with a demonstration of using Positron Assistant, GPT-5-Codex, and Databot in Positron.
If you’re here in the Charlottesville area head over to cvillerusers.github.io to join our mailing list and Discord server to get notified about new events or volunteer to present at a future event!