First CRU event recap

[Stephen Turner]

Hello fellow CRU members!

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 SDS for letting us use the 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 and CRU co-organizer VP Nagraj gave a great talk on practical R packaging with Docker using the pracpac package (Slides, GitHub, CRAN, arXiv).

I wrapped up with a demonstration of using Positron Assistant, GPT-5-Codex, and Databot in Positron (see notes here).

I'll soon put together a (very short!) Google Form on the CRU homepage (https://cvillerusers.github.io/) for anyone who wants to suggest a topic or sign up to present a talk, demo, lightning talk, panel, etc. In the meantime, if you're interested in presenting at our next meeting (shooting for mid-Nov to early Dec), please send me an email or drop some ideas in the #general channel on Discord. Marieke Jones said it best early in the evening - nothing is too small, nothing has to be polished. This is YOUR community, and I'd love to see everyone here on the mic at some point!

If your organization has space and would be willing to host our next event, or if your org can sponsor CRU with a few pizzas at our next event, let me know here or drop it in the Discord. And consider registering for the Charlottesville Data Science meetup on Oct 9 (Vibe coding: is it right for data science?).