Bye, RStudio/Posit! | /en/2024/01/bye-rstudio/

Sad to hear this! I've been a big fan of your work at RStudio. Best of luck for the future.

辉哥，希望您在新的岗位再创辉煌。上次在您这里留言还是Quarto刚出来的时候，我当时就很纳闷官方为什么做出这么个玩意。

The significance of {rmarkdown} as a catalyst for the industry of R users cannot be overstated; I hope you recognize your personal impact. I am so grateful for your open source work over the years, between the blogging, packages, answering stackoverflow questions, and other things that probably went unseen. Wishing you the best in your next endeavours, and looking forward to seeing what you do next!

Rmarkdown revolutionised working with R for me and so many I encounter. There is no metric that can fully convey the impact your work has had on so many. I'm sad to hear you are left in an insecure financial position, but am very keen on seeing what you will be bringing next!

So sorry to hear this! Your work has been instrumental in nearly everything we've done with R for the Rest of Us. Wishing you the best in whatever comes next.

Yihui, it was a pleasure to get to work with you, both as a community member and a fellow RStudio/Posit colleague. Wishing you all the best with your next (minimalist) adventure!

Yihui, in all the uncertainty you are experiencing. Be certain about the following, your contributions have changed lives and made reproducibility far more accessible even to some random fellow in the middle of South Africa.

Sad to know that. Grateful for all you have done for many years. You change many lives with the quality of your work.

Thank you so much, and good luck in your "next chapter"!
Your work helped me immensely for a long time and saved me a lot of time.
While I do not use R or markdown daily anymore, I still feel a lot of gratitude for you.

Best of luck a!

Yihui, the transformative contributions you've made to the R community cannot be overstated and I am lucky to have followed your creation of knitr and R-Markdown since nearly the beginning. Having the good fortune to have you join me for multiple R-Podcast episodes is easily one of my biggest achievements in the community! I am wishing you the best of luck on your future adventures, and of course you have an open invitation to come back to the show anytime 🎤

Thank you Yihui... your work has revolutionized my own workflows.... wishing you the best and what seems like an end is only a bend....

Best of luck Yihui adjusting to your new work life. I’m sure that you welcome (in some way despite the perils of the unknown) the opportunity for introspection and reflection, though like you said, hopefully it’ll only be a few weeks at most. You are an amazing person, but also an excellent coder who can boast that they’ve built software that has been widely adopted and used. As one of the chapters from the Atomic Habits book says, you can also change your identity, which can lead to new habits. In other words, you can explore new frontiers and don’t need to be tied down by the past. You might discover that you now have time for long suppressed ideas / interests. And who knows, maybe another *down software, not necessarily an R package 📦. Though I’m not the only one who has enjoyed your *down R packages :)

Abrazos,
Leo

Best of luck, Yihui! Your work with RMarkdown inspired me in so many ways - from starting a blog, building reports/shiny apps, and writing books and packages. Still super productive with all of this.

I discovered R during my under-graduation in design four years ago and one of the first things I was taught was rmarkdown. Blogdown, xaringan (and Karl!) naturally followed. My first proper website was with blogdown (I now work as a full-time web developer!).

I've grown away from R a little since then but I've always had a copy of RStudio in case I needed to make presentations or nice documents quickly. That is the one thing I find myself reaching for almost every month. This year, in a full circle moment, I submitted my graduation thesis which was written with Rmarkdown as well :) I've not written to or interacted with you before this but the way I see it I couldn't have found many of my current interests, ways of working and maybe even aesthetic standards without the enormous amount of resources and work you made available in the public domain; and for that I am grateful. Thank you for all your efforts and for helping so many people like me grow in their own lives.

Looking forward to whatever you do next. In the meantime, all the best for the new year :)

Yihui, I would like to express my sincere gratitude for your invaluable contributions to the open source community throughout the years. Your remarkable work has had a great impact on me, whether it's personally, professionally, or aesthetically. Please take care of yourself. Looking forward to your next project!

I just came to say thank you so much for the wonderful packages I use almost daily. I am super excited to see what you do next and (selfishly) hoping it is in the biostatistics space :)

Sad to hear that Yihui. Your work is very important in my day to day practice. Wishing you the best for the future !

Thanks so much for all your contributions, Yihui. I'll echo sentiments above that you've transformed the reproducibility environment in ways that are hard to quantify. I think it's only fitting that LEGENDARY status should now be conferred...

Very sad to learn this news, Yihui. As I'm sure you know, your tremendous contributions to R are highly appreciated throughout the R community. I'm sure you'll find a role in which you can do even more. 加油, 加油!

Sad to hear this, Yihui. Your "down" packages were very significant during my school years when I would write up homework assignments or create websites with blogdown. I wish you the best for your future and hope you land an exciting role!

Thanks Yihui. Your work had and still has a tremendous impact on my professional career and allowed me to collaborate with amazing people like @howardbaek on a book project (just above my comment 😉). I wish you all the best for the future and looking forward to seeing the next steps.

Although our paths only crossed occasionally at RStudio / Posit, I have very fond memories of working together, and our conversations at the various conferences over the years. On a personal level, you and knitr deserve credit for getting me excited about R and reproducible research -- I recall seeing and being excited about the first versions of knitr back in 2012, when I had just started my first job as a data analyst using R. And then also our brief chance encounter back at the Gottardo lab in Seattle so many years ago!

I know this isn't goodbye and we'll continue to see each other around in the R ecosystem, but this is as good an opportunity as any to reiterate what an impact your work has had, both for myself and the greater community. Thank you :-)

Hi Yihui, sorry to hear this. I enjoyed working with you years ago when I worked on the Bioconductor project - I believe that was before you started at RStudio/Posit. Best of luck and keep us posted with your future plans (and consider having a look at https://www.fredhutch.org/en/about/careers.html - I'd be happy to be a reference for a job here or anywhere else).

Very sad indeed to hear this news. Your contributions to the community and, on a personal note, the impact of your packages, writings, and invaluable personal suggestions have been significant to me. Many years ago I used to evangelize people about R and reproducible research in Italy using your tools and your advices during that period was deeply appreciated. Thank you! Looking forward to your next steps!

✌️& ❤️ 4 the R 🐐
Keep doing u Yihui

Hi Yihui, this may turn out to be good for you at the end. After a few years, you probably thank Posit for laying you off. For talented people like you, every challenge is an opportunity to grow.
I has been a big fan of yours. Hope I can meet you in person some day.

I can't thank you enough for what you have done to make the publishing ecosystem in R what it is today. I know many people (myself included) whose career paths would have been very different without your work on {knitr}. I say this sincerely: without {rmarkdown}, I would not have been able to effectively create a website tutorial for my package; without {blogdown}, my blog would have fallen into disarray years ago; without {bookdown}, I would have been forced to format my dissertation in Word; and without {knitr}, none of these would have even been possible.

Thank you for delivering us from Word, Sweave, and Jekyll. And mostly, thank you for all the gifs, grace, and levity you've given us throughout the years. I'm wishing you luck and am excited for what comes next in your journey

Thanks a lot for your contribution in R community. I used blogdown for my personal website.

Best of luck! I can't imagine where I would have ended up without having knitr/rmarkdown/bookdown in my toolbelt.

It makes me very sad, I have been using R around the time you worked at RStudio. I can't believe how the Rstudio leaders can treat the brilliant people like that. I am sure you will find some places better than RStudio.

Your tools remain my constant companions, and I remain a big fan. Thank you. ❤️

Yihui,

I cannot even begin to describe how immeasurable your contribution to the open source community has been. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for everything! I look forward to supporting and following you on your next journey. ❤️

I recently finished writing my master's degree paper with Bookdown. I really appreciate Yihui contribution to the R user community and reproducibility. 👏👏👏
Big thank you ❤️.

Yihui,
Wanted to suggest two (paid) avenues for teaching/sharing your knowledge with others:

1. https://codehorizons.com
2. https://sites.google.com/view/dariia-mykhailyshyna/main/r-workshops-for-ukraine
   More generally, perhaps creating a (paid) course would be a good way to capitalize on your skills. Have seen many people do this.

Thanks for all the work you've done!

Thanks so much, Yihui, for creating knitr and making the Rmd ecosystem so good as to become indispensable. From the earliest version, it was already a huge step change from Sweave, and it's been leading the way ever since (and beyond R). I see it as groundbreaking and influential as ggplot2 has been in the graphics world.

Best wishes for the next chapter in your professional journey, I look forward to hearing about it.

It has been amazing to see the growth of your packages over the last few years, ever since I first switched to knitr.

Best wishes for 2024 and I hope the job offers will be coming along.

益辉你好，我是GWU的一名博士生，从我导师那里听闻你离职的消息，倍感惊讶。我一直在用RStudio和众多由你开发的工具。在项目期间，导师也多次提到你，说你对R语言生态的贡献良多。他每每提及，均赞赏有加。
如你所言，“危机”之中不仅有危险，也蕴含着机会。希望你一切顺利！加油！

I'm very sad to hear this news, but I do hope that this brings great opportunities for you and I wish you all the best. Thank you so much for all your contributions, Yihui. ❤️

Your contributions to the R and open-source communities have been prolific and you should be proud of your accomplishments! I'll be rooting for you as you enter this period of uncertainty; may 2024 bring you endless opportunities! (We've also run into each other at R Studio Conferences and various user groups around Omaha, so "hello!" and good luck from a fellow Omahan! ❤️)

Hi Yihui,
I am very sorry to hear about you being let go by Posit. I remember how your being with RStudio and your presence at RStudio events generated a significant amount of good will for RStudio. It was a great pleasure being your colleague, and I am still thankful for the help you provided to me. Please consider if your R work could be structured in a way to be eligible for an R Consortium ISC grant. I would be happy to discuss this with you anytime. director@r-consortiu,.org

Hi Yihui,

A lot of folks have already said what I would like to say, only better.

Your contributions pushed the boundaries of what I thought possible, and got me truly excited to try things out.

Trusting that you will find new opportunities to create (suitably minimal) worlds.

@yihui Thank you for all the amazing work you've done!
I wish you the best.
Jerzy

Blessing in disguise. Wish all the best in future!

Go minimalist!

我靠～～～

好吧，都没啥大错误

加油！

Yihui, thank you so much for your great work and the meaningful changes you have made for accessible software. Without your {*down} packages, studying R would have been impossible for me. Plus, I was able to learn how to contribute to open-source projects from your constructive PR reviewe and kind pointers all the time. You have truly created an inclusive, accessible, and reproducible ecosystem for all. I wish you the very best of luck on your new journey and I am rooting for you.

Yihui-

Getting to work alongside you and Christophe continues to be one of the most rewarding experiences in my career. Your tools changed the entire trajectory of my career, and made this psychologist into someone who has now been afflicted with a lifelong burning desire to build beautiful HTML things, and I'm eternally grateful for how you made literate programming accessible for the rest of us.

I wish you the best of luck and hope that you land in a place where your minimalism can be maximized to its fullest impact. I look forward to reading what is next for you, and I trust you'll share as always.

My best to you and your family,
Alison

Best wishes for your new journey. I'm looking forward to seeing what new things you will create in future!

Wish you all the best !!

So sad to hear you go, and hopefully the news did not come at a huge shock. I am a big fan of your work (R) and writing. Wishing you the best for the journey ahead. Indeed, only opportunities ahead.

Yihui—I wish you the best of luck moving forward—you are a gem in the community. I will be curious to see your next steps—-I bet it’ll be great.

A couple potentially relevant things:

• this bulk hire for RSEs out of UF

-I know this isn’t a job, but this seed funding for OS work out of NASA—-solicitation is very broad!

江湖夜雨十年灯！

Thank you Yihui for all your contribution to the R community. I still remember your work and your name many years after I switched to Python. Trust me, this is nothing but a new opportunity for you. You will shine on other things like a star soon.
走出一条新的路来，加油！

Hi Yihui, your work and writings have always been inspirations for me. I'm sure you will land somewhere better that appreciate your contributions. Best wishes!

Wish you the best.
Looking forward to see you enjoy your next journey!

R Markdown ecosystem is where I started working on OSS contributions.
I am lucky because you were there.
Your kind words and reviews motivated me on contributions in this world.
Thank you.

Hi Yihui, no worries and you will be fine.

Very sad to hear that, Yihui. Not just me but the large part of academia has benefitted from your work. I too also sometimes find RStudio as a whole a bit bulky and heavy. It's more of an IDE than a content composer. Perhaps take this chance and your expertise to create a "minimalistic" version of R IDE that focuses on content writing and collaboration? Does it sound feasible to you?

Reading your goodbye post was motivational and should serve as a model for anyone wishing to achieve a state of Zen 🌄 through embracing open source philosophy, work-life balance, a life vision, etc. Seeing the comments and the tone you set for responses made it much more pleasant. For any open source enthusiast, all of these serve as powerful beacons of light and a true example to follow. You can't even imagine the areas that your packages and posts have touched. I have made beautiful handouts, webpages, slideshows, notes, and more with your projects. After ten years in one framework, it is difficult to start anew in a fresh perspective. I am eager to witness and absorb inspiration from your next adventure. I'm sending you heaps of karma points and sending you my warmest wishes. I regret in part that, in light of all of your kind and free contributions, my financial situation as a PhD candidate prevents me from sponsoring anything. However, I'm sure I will shortly. I hope you have an amazing year.

So sad to hear this. As an R veteran that shapes how R & repoducible research are wielded for a decade, you deserve better than a fxxking 2-week layoff notice.

Wish you the best.

回来高低得请你喝顿酒

Best of luck and thanks for all your contributions, they have been life-changing for teaching

I'm sorry to hear that Yihui. Blogdown, xaringan and other down packages were literally what made R fun for me, and made me realise that as a 'stats' student there can be more than just maths, where visualisation, reproducible reporting and web can be perfectly valid paths to pursue. In my first job Rmarkdown has made our work in disease surveillance and automated reporting so much more productive than the traditional ways. And this was before quarto was out.

Thank you for all the contributions you made!

I'm quite surprised that posit laid off one of its most productive employees that made so much contributions to the R community.

I wish you all the best in the future, and I'm sure you will be as great as in your next adventures! Will keep an eye on new Chinese recipes!

I saw the sharing link of your article from Twitter.

If possible, you can now try to seek temporary help from relatives, classmates, fellow villagers, etc.

(Please DON'T BE STINGY! DON'T BE SHY! Asking for help is not begging, it shows that you trust the other person and will enhance

your relationship with it);

Happy New Year!

No matter what happens, I hope you can get over this difficult situation quickly and God bless you and your family.

Thank you.
As an educator and a colleague, I’ve used your packages to be a better communicator. I wish you the best.

I cannot quantify in any precise way the impact your work has had over the last decade.

Let me just say it made so many things possible for me, specifically in the Bioinformatics field:

• writing lengthy, good looking reports became a breeze
• scripting presentations was at once a pleasure
• creating own and project websites became possible for an html profane

All of this, you "just made it happen" with an aura of being a golden person: humble, clever, committed.

I wish you all the best in your life, work-wise and not only.
Till the next time we will have the chance to meet in real life.
Un abbraccio,
Federico

I just want to thank you sincerely for all of your work. Government reports on infectious disease outbreaks and responses are often driven by RMarkdown reports. Over the years I have personally learned so much about how to be a good programmer by stalking your code bases. Thank you for revolutionizing quantitative data communication and keeping R a viable language (and all the countless hours you've poured in to develop and supporting it).

Yihui, I now understand that the difficulties you mentioned earlier were related to this situation. I'm truly sorry to hear about the loss of your job, but I firmly believe that new opportunities will come your way. Your writing skills are truly remarkable, and if you were to publish a book, I have no doubt that it would captivate and resonate with a wide readership. As a loyal reader, I wish you the best in the future.

We are lucky to have you. Looking forward to seeing what you start working on next.

It doesn't make sense, I learnt R and inspired from your work, you went above and beyond your responsibilities, making a significant contribution to the open R community. In China, nearly all of my friends who use R come across your posts or tutorials.

Hi Yihui
Another note of great appreciation for all your work on knitr/rmarkdown and friends over many years.
I was happy to be able to sponsor you.
-Michael

Hi Yihui
Just thanks you, for the packages, the posts and the tutorials.

Abdoul

The importance of Rmarkdown (and the associated family of packages) can't be overstated. It brought a great many new users to R (even non-statisticians like me!) and helped propel R and RStudio to where they are today. That's an incredible legacy to have and I'm looking forward to hearing about what you get up to next!

Best wishes.

I am a great admirer of your work. I have to thank you for the great minimalistic but effective piece of code that you have produced and ver the years. Learned quite a lot from your approach.

Rmarkdown, knitter, the x-down collection are the greatest contributions to the R ecosystem because it was able to communicate results with the world.

I have thinking a lot about you lately, because you would be a great acquisition for a software company I admire a lot: Obsidian. Same style: minimalistic, elegant, with lots of hidden power.

Hope you find your new job soon. You deserve the best.

Cheers,
Alfonso R. Reyes

祝好。

Any interest joining Meta? R Markdown package helps tons of users like me. You must have a lot of connections, but I can also try to connect you with our recruiters to see if there is a matching position.

Thank you so much for all you've provided to everyone interested in literate programming and reproducible research!!! You've inspired many people and I know you will find success and happiness following your instincts!

從朋友領英那邊連過來看的, 很有理想的網誌, 支持！

Hi Yihui,
I just want to thank for everything you built for us! knitr, rmarkdown and all the packages you built with rstudio/posit are amazing. You made reproducible research accessible to many of us. I wish you the best, and I'll keep following what you do next.
Thank you

十年资深程序员居然还有未还完的房贷，不得不说他们亏待你了！未来，美好的事情终会发生！

确实没有想到他们会这么直接地把工作十年的老员工就这么开了。相信以你的能力很快就会有新的职位在等待着你，祝福你益辉！

第一次在谢老师的blog下留言，研究生期间学习公众号撰写了解到老师的bookdown和rmarkdown开发文档，用rmarkdown摸鱼看金刚经。。。那是最开心的一段时光了。老师是我学习r语言的领路人，感谢老师！㊗️老师前程无量，早日实现财务自由🎉🎉🎉

有点巧，我是在10月31日当天被公司通知 layoff 的，当天通知当天关闭所有账号。当时觉得愕然，但很快还是释然了，特别喜欢你说的这句话—— The end of a relationship often does not imply anything wrong or a failure of either party. Instead, it can simply indicate a mismatch, which is normal.

同样我也对”危机“有了自己的认知。这段时间我对自己的技术、职业，行业的环境，乃至家庭都有一番思考。必须承认，Layoff的冲击让我的思考更加全面和深入，这是 Layoff 给我带来的最大的正面作用。

You've been an inspiration and a colleague to me since we both graduate students, and I can't express what joy it has given me to watch your vision for dynamic and reproducible documents take hold and spread through academia and the R community. Sometimes I can't believe we haven't met in person, I probably learned more from you than some of my labmates in those early days :-)

I agree that both monolithic and small projects have their strengths and weaknesses but I share your belief in small unix-y tools, (and sometimes worry about the more monolithic design of quarto). I know transitions can be difficult but I am confident you will navigate it well and excited to see where you go next!

Thank you! I know nothing about R but I've used the hugo theme (hugo-xmin) created by you for many years! Wish you the best!

看到这个消息着实感到惊讶。祝辉哥顺利过渡，找到属于自己的best match

Thank you for your great work in the R community, Yihui, and wishing you the best moving forward.

Thank you for all your contributions. Wishing you all the very best.

以前用过大佬的rmarkdown，真的大大改变了我的workflow。祝一切顺利！

rmarkdown用户送来祝福。yihui前辈不仅技术有实力，对待人生亦乐观豁达，实乃我辈楷模！愿前辈在新的旅途上轻装上阵，拥有新的收获！

Last year I was in the same shoe, now I doubled my salary and work in a very supportive team, this is a chance to break out of the comfort zone and think about pursuing a different life, and there is no need to stress. Good luck to your next endeavor mate.

Cannot believe this is true! How is it possible RStudio let go the creator of one of its cornerstone product? Thank you for contributing such wonderful tools to the R community and saving my PhD! Wish you all the best!

The problem of reproducibility in academic literature remains huge, of course. The work you have done really shows the path forward. The tools are there, thanks to people like you, now we just have to change the culture. Thanks so much and best wishes.

Thank you for everything you contribute to R with knitr and the *down package, Yihui.
Echoing others here, your work underpins the thousands of analysis documents (not to mention my PhD thesis) I've written since knitr was first published.
For me, this revolutionised the process of writing reproducible research analysis documents.
My best wishes to you in the next phase of your career and I hope you find work that marries your life's needs and desires.

Dear Yihui,
I always loved your work, since the early days of animation. I have full trust in your future, and I'm excited to see what awesomeness you'll unleash into the world.
Yours always,
T

Thank you for all your work, Yihui, and all the best for your next steps! You have had a huge impact on my career as I got into R in 2014. In 2007, after a week-end-workshop on R, I vowed to "never open the software again". Things were different when I came back to R in 2015-2016, partly due to tidyverse of course, and partly due to your contributions to reproducible research (and animation, as talgalili pointed out). I now teach R workshops in far-away Germany and enjoy that much more than the SPSS and Excel freelance work I did previously.

Love your Xaringan, first encountered the package in my remote sensing moudle uisng RStudio. Saved my slide for the module exam!!

Just want to say a huge thank you for creating so many amazing stuffs like hugo themes, xaringan, blogdown, etc. It opened up a whole new world for me in data science and presentation skills. Keep up the great work and all the best for the future!

I would like to join all the others in extending my gratitude for the great work you have been doing!

Yihui,
I want to echo the many notes here and express gratitude for the incredible contributions you've made to the R community. I've benefited hugely from your work, going back even to the time before JJ made the incredibly shrewd decision to hire you full time. I'm eager to hear what you will be doing next. An advanced congratulations to whomever determines to employ you next!

Good luck! Thank you for your work and your state of mind :) 10 years is really a long length, it's normal to change. See you soon back, after a pause, in the R ecosystem or other open source projects that you like :)

Yihui, I join the choir wishing you all the best for the next chapter. I appreciate your stance on "crisis" ... and addressing change as an opportunity. It is reassuring to hear that you will not completely leave the universe and orbit around the community and "down" packages. Your work was transformative, and I wish you all the best, creativity, and idealism in whatever new role is ahead of you.