2018 was a good year for R Views. With a total of sixty-three posts for the year, we exceeded the pace of at least one post per week. But, it wasn’t quantity we were shooting for. Our main goal was, and continues to be, featuring thoughtful commentary on topics of interest to the R Community and in-depth technical elaboration of R language applications.

Before highlighting a few of my favorite posts for 2018, I would like to express my profound gratitude to our guest bloggers (R Community members who are not employed at RStudio), our regular RStudio contributors who sparkled with creativity while meeting committed deadlines, and you, our readers, who made it all worthwhile.

At the top of my list for 2018 posts is the interview with mathematician Noah Giansiracusa: A Mathematician’s Pespective on Topological Analysis and R. Although my name is on the byline, this is really a guest post. Professor Giansiracusa’s openness, enthusiasm, lucidity and excitement about doing mathematics and finding genuine value in using R makes this post outstanding.

The three part series of posts: Statistics in Glaucoma (Part I, Part II and Part III) by statisticians Sam Berchuck and Joshua Warren establishes a new standard for posts introducing academic research. It is a masterful exposition of their quest to find a predictive model of disease progression. More than tutorial on the underlying R packages, the series prepares interested readers for reading the authors’ academic research papers.

Other noteworthy guest posts included:
* Eric Anderson: Alternative Design for Shiny
* Anqi Fu, Balasubramanian Narasimhan, Stephen Boyd: CVXR: A Direct Standardization Example
* David Kane: Player Data for the 2018 FIFA World Cup
* Roland Stevenson: In-database xgboost predictions with R
* Sebastian Wolf: How to Build a Shiny “Truck”!

Regular R Views readers will know that RStudio’s Jonathan Regenstein’s posts in his series Reproducible Finance with R are always dependable “good reads”. In addition to Jonathan’s financial analyses, his posts feature Shiny applications and elegant code applicable to many every-day programming tasks. If you have any interest at all in doing Finance with R, I highly recommend Jonathan’s new book Reproducible Finance with R: Code Flows and Shiny Apps for Portfolio Analysis which is based on his R Views posts.

The 2018 “R for the Enterprise* series featured posts by RStudio solution engineers Cole Arendt, James Blair, Kelly O’Briant, Edgar Ruiz, Nathan Stephens, and Andrie de Vries that provided sophisticated, in-depth coverage of a variety of enterprise-level topics such as Slack and Plumber Part One and Part Two and Enterprise Dashboards with R Markdown.

Finally, if in an idle moment you would like to review some of the more interesting new packages that made it to CRAN in 2018, you can peruse my monthly Top 40 picks.

All of us at R Views wish you a Happy and Prosperous New Year!