How to attend RStudio Conference 2022 remotely for free

If you’re not able to attend RStudio Conference 2022 in person July 27-28, you can still tune in to watch live, and even submit questions remotely and join a Discord discussion server with other virtual attendees, all for free.

The main conference, billed as an event to “connect, learn, and celebrate all things R and RStudio,” starts Wednesday, July 27, at 9 am EDT in Washington, DC. There are preconference workshops July 25-26.

The keynotes and presentations (but not preconference workshops) will be streamed live from the conference website at https://www.rstudio.com/conference/. You can see the full schedule and select which sessions to add to your schedule. As of this writing, you can also submit your email address at that conference page if you want to be notified when the Discord link is live (scroll down to the “Participate virtually” section of the web page).

The opening keynote will be on “Good practices for applied machine learning—from model development to model deployment,” and there will be additional modeling and MLOps talks later in the conference. Another keynote is “The Past and Future of Shiny,” which will be followed by an intriguing session later in the conference titled “Running Shiny without a server,” by RStudio’s Winston Chang. The Shiny package for creating interactive web apps with R typically requires a server, unless those apps are running locally in an R session.

Quarto, the next-generation R Markdown system, will be highlighted at the conference as well. RStudio has done a soft launch of Quarto over the past months, but the technical publishing platform will move into a spotlight at the conference with several Quarto-focused sessions.

Multilingual data work in both R and Python will be another theme—there are more than a dozen sessions that include Python as a core topic, such as “Achieving a seamless workflow between R, Python, and SAS from within RStudio” and “R, Python, and Tableau: A Love Triangle.” And, Quarto is as native to Python and Observable JavaScript as it is to R.

As always, there will be sessions offering tips and case studies across a wide range of R topics, as well as advice on working with RStudio’s paid enterprise products.

If you want to follow the conference on Twitter, keep an eye on both the #rstudioconf and #rstudioconf2022 hashtags; I’ve seen both of them used. You can search for both with this Twitter.com link, or learn how to code your own searchable table of conference tweets with R.

If you can’t make the conference either in person or virtually, videos are usually posted sometime after the event. You can watch pre-pandemic RStudio Conference 2020 videos at the conference website or on YouTube. (Last year’s conference was cancelled.)

For more on R, check out InfoWorld’s Do More With R tutorial series.