2025 has been quite a year at R for the Rest of Us. The end of the year marks six years since I founded R for the Rest of Us and I’m delighted to say that this has been one of the most successful years ever.

The biggest change this year has been spinning off the consulting arm of R for the Rest of Us. Now known as Clarity Data Studio, this change has allowed us to clarify (see what I did there?) the consulting work we do (more on this below).

One of the best parts of running a business has been getting to work with super talented people. As we wrap up 2025, the current R for the Rest of Us / Clarity Data Studio team includes Tanya Shapiro, Albert Rapp, Joseph Barbier, Gracielle Higino, Deepali Kank, and Joe Wanyua. While you know me as the face of R for the Rest of Us / Clarity Data Studio, these are the people who, in many ways, do much of the work that you see.

Supporting Good Causes

While it has been a good year for my business, I recognize how fortunate I am. For many, 2025 has been anything but a good year. While my ability to support broad social change is limited, I do believe in donating a portion of all course sales to organizations working for social and environmental justice. Through our One Percent for People, One Percent for the Planet initiative we have donated over $3,000 to the National Immigration Law Center and the Nature Conservancy, including over $2,000 from our Black Friday sale alone. Thank you to all who purchased courses during that time and throughout the year.

Courses

Things have rolled along with courses this year. We re-released two courses (Mapping with R and Using Git and GitHub with R).

We finished our 10th cohort of R in 3 Months this fall. We’ve now taught over 400 people through this program, and I’m really proud of how smoothly it runs. Next cohort starts in March if you want to sign up!

I will say that overall, I have noticed lower sign-ups for courses. This does have me wondering about changes in online education moving forward. Did people get burned out on online education during COVID? Will people stop wanting to learn through traditional online courses and use AI instead? More on this soon!

Training for Organizations

In addition to courses, we have continued to do training for organizations. Some highlights include work with Austin ECHO, which helps support that Texas city’s homelessness response system, to transition their annual state of the HRS reports ( see the 2024 version) into Quarto.

We also continued our work with Rosov Consulting, doing some training and also helping them to build a template for their reports in Quarto.

Finally, we continued our work with longtime partner Omni Institute. Much of our work with them has been answering ongoing questions as they continue their transition to R. Most excitingly, we also helped Omni as they did a very sleek company-wide rebrand this year. On our end, this involved generating a new report template for them in R.

Consulting

As you can see in all three of these projects, much of our training work also involves consulting. And much of our consulting work involves creating PDF reports . I always tell people that I never expected that my thing in the R world would be “maker of highly-branded PDF reports” but here we are! In our straight consulting work (i.e. work where we are hired just to write code, not teach others to write code), we also made a lot of PDFs.

We continued our work on Oregon by the Numbers. This is the eighth year of work on this report, making all of the visuals that appear within it. The big difference this year is that we made full pages in Quarto (previously, we had made hundreds of images each year, which the designer had painstakingly placed into InDesign). You may not notice a difference in what the 2025 report looks like, but not noticing a difference is a compliment because it means that we matched what the designer had done in InDesign in Quarto.

We also continued to work with the Johns Hopkins University International Vaccine Access Center (IVAC). This year, we helped them to produce state-level reports on childhood immunization.

For the IVAC reports, we used Quarto and Typst. For those not familiar with it, Typst is a modern, lightweight typesetting system designed to make creating well‑formatted documents faster and more intuitive than traditional tools like LaTeX. It’s great, but also a bit confusing to learn. In December, we released a monster blog post titled How to Make High-Quality PDFs with Quarto and Typst.

We are also doing more work that combines R with other tools . Especially for interactive dashboards, we have found that Shiny is a good approach for some, but not all, projects. For example, for a project with our longtime client Prosper Portland, we created an interactive dashboard to enable them to view businesses they work with. This tool was built with the PHP framework Laravel and Javascript.

One of the aims of rebranding the consulting arm of the business as Clarity Data Studio is to highlight that we use a range of tools (kinda confusing for a business called R for the Rest of Us to talk about making a dashboard in Laravel and Javascript). With the new name, we increasingly focus on choosing the right tools for each project.

2026

As we move into 2026, here’s what we are planning.

On the R for the Rest of Us course side , I am currently in the process of re-recording the core courses (Getting Started with R, Fundamentals of R, and Going Deeper with R) using the Positron code editor . I’ve been thinking a fair amount about the pros and cons of Positron, and I think the former outweigh the latter (I was also recently amazed at how AI built into Positron can make debugging WAY easier). Keep an eye out for updated courses in the first half of 2026.

I’m also looking at ways to add AI into R for the Rest of Us courses. I want to be thoughtful about this because I think we’ve all seen products that add AI for no reason other than it is the new hotness. I’m considering adding an AI bot that will give you additional exercises on lessons. If you have other ideas for how I can productively incorporate AI, please do let me know!

I’m also considering putting together a reporting masterclass course. Many people ask how we make reports like the ones featured above, and I’d like to have a course that shows this. If this is something that you are interested in, please let me know!

Finally, we are currently in the process of putting together an R package to help make accessible PDFs. One thing that making all of these PDFs has taught us is the importance of accessibility. Making accessible PDFs is, we have learned, extremely challenging (though the most recent release of Typst makes it much easier. The to-be-named package that will check PDFs for accessibility and provide clear, actionable feedback to help you ensure that PDFs you make are fully accessible.

That’s it for this year at R for the Rest of Us / Clarity Data Studio. I hope 2025 has treated you well, and I wish you all the best for 2026!