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

Yihui, thank you so much for all your contributions to R, all of your contributions have been things that I have used throughout my career, and have helped me craft better talks, better blogs, better papers, and inspire me to learn just a little bit more about how things work. I can't thank you enough!

Yihui, a short, sincere note of thanks from a grateful dabbler! I imagine by the time I am writing this you'll have received enough offers among which to pick a new path, so wishing you poise and peace in that.

Am I the only one tearing🥺Thanks for your work and inspiring personalities!

Sad to here that.
所以北美tennue还真是铁饭碗啊.

I'm so sorry to hear that. Rmarkdown and knitr have been very important to me as both an analyst and a package developer. I am very grateful for your works.

Yihui, thank you so much for everything you've done for R...your contributions have been invaluable for me and countless others. Wish you the best for what you do next, and thank you thank you thank you!!

Thank you for all you've done for R...! Wish you a "Day Day Up"! 🤗

Yihui, you are the most self-motivated person that I know so far. You are always my role model, and I know you've probably received a lot of job invitations by now. 😛

Happy New Year to you and your family, and best wishes for your new journey!

坚持自我总是开心的事情，至少不至于像词里说的那样“千古声名，百年担负，事事违初意”。

Dear Yihui,
You helped me transform my daily work and this allowed me to help others transform theirs and now a large part of my organisation benefits from your contributions. In your blog you mentioned to contact you if someone has a job opening or is interested in your skills - which gave me some ideas. I'd imagine that you must have been approached by dozens if not hundreds of different organisations, but if you are still available and interested to hear me please feel free to contact me. Good luck on your next steps. Georgios

I'm TAing a course at UCL CASA, and we use your packages. I want to say thank you for your contribution! All the best for your future career.

Dear Yihui,

I am a big fan of your R packages. Because of your work, I started blogging, I created my first website, I do all my presentations using xaringan etc etc etc. You really inspired a lot of people, and I really wish you all the best, hope you get what you wish.

Best wishes from Brazil.

Best of luck, I like to think that change brings opportunity. It's hard to overstate the importance of Rmarkdown to my career and I hope that my small contribution is of help.

I just wanted to say thank you Yihui for all your great work. Your knitr and rmarkdown packages bring fun and enjoyment to my work, where I used to be stuck in the misery of copy-pasting R output into Word documents. And without blogdown I wouldn't have a personal website. I look forward to what you achieve next. P.S. I think your style is already quite minimalist, afterall not many other people use single letter variable names 🙂

你永远是我的榜样。

Hi Yihui,

I'd like to thank you for a lot of things. For one, I've been using your template for my personal website for like 10 years now. For another, reading your blog (especially the Chinese and non-tech ones) has helped me through my PhD days in the US; it reminds me that it is possible to have a life besides the Ph.D part. For yet another, I've benefited so much from your great work in R in general. 谢谢你！希望你一切顺利，期待有机会面基！

When I first started using R, I faced some challenges, but Rmarkdown and Rnotebook made it significantly easier to integrate code, results, and analysis seamlessly. My blog still relies on your blog theme as its foundation, and it continues to serve me well. Your contributions have been immensely valuable to me, and I genuinely wish you all the best in your future endeavors.

Thanks for the honest and brave blog post Yihui! Millions of people have benefited from your work. If you're interested in teaching, we'd be happy to welcome you in our trainer community (https://digital-research.academy/). Feel free to reach out!

Thank you so much for all your work Yihui!

Yihui, I'm so glad and grateful I had the opportunity to work with you, both for your software development and for working with you as a person. I admire and appreciate your writing, your approach to challenges, and the humor, guidance and knowledge you bring to sharing with others. All the best, always, and I hope we have continued opportunities to work together.

I first knew about you when I came across your posts on 统计之都 maybe about 7 to 8 years ago, when I was half way through my PhD. Since I work a lot more on raster data than I used to, I have been using R less frequently than before and gravitating towards Python. However, your work over the past decade has been tremendous to the entire R/open source community. Hope you will find a path that suits you soon and look forward to hearing about it in your blog!

Wow! Surprising and bad news. In my opinion, the "*down" contributions are (have been?) one of the major reasons of preferring R over alternatives. It may not pay the mortgage, but it is definitely something to be proud of.

You changed the way I do research, thank you! What are the plans for the future? Perhaps explore another language?

Dear Yihui,

I've been using your work and reading your responses to users for the last 10 years: since the early days of RMarkdown, Shiny and the shiny-discuss google group, through stackoverflow, to your beautiful documentation tools with bookdown (also the xaringan library!). In my previous organisation, I was the only one who knitted R-markdowns and as a result I was both admired and feared in a team of data-nerds. Nowadays R-markdowns power many of the most advanced reports and studies my team does. Interactive r-markdowns are a perfect fit for the Operations Research/ decision science communities.

I've been a user as an employee, a PhD student, entrepreneur and consultant. You were always very patient and very involved. You fixed errors before people found them. Every time I found some new cool r-base reporting library, you were behind it. Thanks for all your work.

I'm sure you'll find amazing things to build and I'm looking forward to see/ read them.

I don't know you in person, but I deeply appreciate all your work. They help me a lot in my study and work. Best wishes to you! 🤞

Thanks for your contribution. Rmarkdown, knitr helped me to get my first full time job. That are great tools! I just can not believe how Posit make this decision. I believe the talent people like you can easily find the next step! Wish you all the best and God bless you during this transition time.

Just adding my thanks, and hopefully reassurance that there is an enormous community of very grateful people out there. Your contributions to many communities have been enormous and I encourage anyone who wants to see such great work like this in the future to contribute if they can.

Keep up the amazing work!

Good luck! I've been using rmarkdown for years, and it's been a great help at work. It allows me to easily create automated reports, saving time on mundane tasks and allowing me to focus more on analysis. Thank you for your contribution, and I'd love to have this opportunity to sponsor you!

Surprised! And all the best wishes to you! I am an R user from linguistics and translation studies. Your work on bookdown and other R packages and all those knowledge-sharing endeavors (including your blogs) really helped me a lot in doing research and cultivating a habit of writing (like you just said). I will always be a loyal follower of your blog and please keep up your excellent work!!

辉哥，加油！没了你的posit少了什么无法用言语表达，但期待你的下一步！

I'll never forget your 2012 presentation at UseR! Vanderbilt. I walked out of that presentation, opened my laptop, and started downloading knitr. When I got back to Chicago I immediately started using it in my work, and I've never stopped.

If it weren't for weren't for RMarkdown (and data.table) I probably would have switched to Python by now (and I'd probably still be debating if I should upgrade from 2.7... what a mess that would be, lol).

我是在读博期间开始接触到 rmarkdown，当时还在课题会上给课题组的同学们展示了下怎么生成 ppt，从此一发不可收拾。如果不是 rmarkdown 这一套工作流程，恐怕我的博士学位还要再晚些拿。现在变成青椒后我上的所有课基本都用了 rmarkdown 来制作部分或全部的教学材料。特别是 R 语言这门课，我还用了你在 rstudio::conf 2019 pagedown presentation 的开场部分（你讲了个 “I'm responsible for a lot of things down, except for the current government shutdown" 的笑话）来告诉我学生，代码虽然没有生命，但是代码的背后是一个个有意思、鲜活的人，学习编程可以是一件有意思的事情。
感谢益辉，愿你一切顺遂！

Just here to say thank you - you have built tools that enable research and other work across the world (very much including my own). Reading your post, I thought it really reflected a thoughtful, conscientious person. Wishing you the best on your next adventure(s).

辉哥, 感谢你！ (There, that's all the Chinese I know) Thank Yihui, for being such an integral part of my 'R' journey, which has in turn been a joyous part of my studies in improving healthcare for my own practice population as well as in a child development project in Kenya.

Whereas all the tidyverse stuff has been instrumental in treating information/data as 'information for purpose' (as opposed to data which needs to be iterated over), the 'knitr'/'blogdown'/'bookdown'/'DT' etc. has been such a big part of the "telling the story" about the information in a clear, reproducible manner which doesn't obscure the underlying information (as opposed to ... ahem ... Power#!). I'm using many of those packages right now to generate reports for the child development program.

So, thanks again, and best wishes for the New Year! 一帆风顺！

Yihui, I'm a huge RMarkdown/knitr fan and I've always wanted to thank you for the work that you've done.

The impact it has is off the charts: So often I've seen useful insights go to waste, because analysts have a hard time conveying their findings in a quick and suitable way. Your work builds the bridge that helps good insights reach the right people with ease and elegance. With that, RMarkdown has irreversibly changed the standards for communication in the community and the wave of impact is still rolling. You hold my deepest respect.

Hi Yihui,

I entered Iowa State University in the winter of 2012, majoring in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology. In my first year on campus, I proactively reached out to you, and we had a two-hour meetup. To be honest, meeting you in person was more exciting than my first arrival in the United States. During the meetup, I recall you mentioned that it was your final year of Ph.D. studies and you were working on a book about knitr. I assume it has been published by now.

Perhaps you've forgotten, but you provided me with valuable advice during that meeting. You suggested using Ubuntu for development, paying attention to HTML5 and Markdown technologies, and these recommendations have continued to influence me. R was the first programming language I learned, although I haven't used it for quite some time now. However, I have found my direction and have been striving to become an open-source contributor like yourself.

Recently, I developed a simple online LaTeX equations editor, https://mathcheap.xyz, which went live a few days ago. This brought you back to my thoughts, prompting me to visit your blog and see how you've been. That's why I came across this post. After reading your sponsorship page, it seems you may not need additional support. Nevertheless, I made a modest donation as a token of my gratitude. It's not much, just a way to express my thanks. I hope to have the opportunity to meet and talk with you again.

Best regards,
Shen Lu

Your work's contributed so much to making RStudio a great tool for reproducible research and writing ... [Edit: I just mean to say your work has helped many around the world. I wish you all the best on your path.]

I just heard the news because I intentionally looked you up, as I do every so often. Why do I look you up? It became clear to me years ago that you are a leader. I am of the opinion that you did not just shape RStudio's enterprise, but an entire industry of data science orientated programmers. Millions feel your impact and will likely never know it. I'm leaving this note to let you know that some random internet stranger has followed your blog and tools over the years with great appreciation. I hope the "invisible hand" does not get you down too much. The ceiling will always be wherever you want it to be because you are a genuine leader in my eyes. Thanks again Yihui <3

As a statistician which has been inspired by your works in Rstudio, I want to say thanks for all you have done for us whole the worls.
Although, it's been a while which I use quarto for my researches, but for me, every thing started with your down packages, specially blogdown that made me to started thinking about my personal website which I have now. I've learned much from you, then you have my respect forever.
Finally I want to say that:
Yihui is not down. Yihui is up, because of all of his downs(blogdown, bookdown, posterdown etc).
best regards
Reza

感谢您为R语言做出的贡献。作为一个刚学R语言的新人，我非常喜欢Rmarkdown的简洁高效。同时，我非常感谢你写的R语言，Rmarkdown文档，这些对于新手而言，实在是太重要了。对于向您一样的开源工作者，我始终保持最崇高的敬意。再次表达我的您的感谢。祝先生生活愉快，万事如意。

Hello Yihui,
Thanks you so much for everything you have done for us, for the R and open source community.
When I first heard your name, I though it was 一辉, yeah, the Phoenix Ikki (凤凰星座一辉) in Saint Seiya. Your will never be down, 你是不死鸟一辉，你拥有自我修复能力最强的圣衣，你是拥有不死之身的斗士。
I wish you all the best in your future endeavors!
Xiaoyao

Admittedly, I am late to the party, I hadn't been here for a while and had to be pointed to this post, but as not only a fan of the work but also the 'brand' I am among those surprised.

I hope you have a good impression of to how many people your name (or at least jee-hu-ee) has become synonymous for reproducible research. Your impact on the community has been massive over two decades, making so many people consider the R ecosystem. I hope I get this right: 加油, Yihui!

(FWIW, if you'd ever wrote about whether working on quarto ever been an option for you – I'd definitely read it.)

I just stopped by to check on you. I'm glad to see that SwissRe is paying the bills. Good luck with everything.

益辉大哥，祝安好！
——小弟敬上

You are just like a modern swordsman. I aspire to become someone like you.

Keep moving on.

益辉您好！

自从年初看到您的帖子就想给您留言，但是每次写了很多又删了。DDDD（懂得都懂）之前18年最开始接触rmd的时候就给您写过email您还回复了。我现在工作学习还是一直在用rmd也推荐给很多同事。虽然Quarto有很多新的features可是在我心中rmd还是不可替代的。望您一切都好！机遇不断！

Thanks for your remarkable work in R package and R community!
時至今日，我的部落格還是使用益輝最極簡的 HUGO XMIN XDDDD。謝謝益輝對 R 語言社群的貢獻，也希望您未來一切都會順利！！

在欧洲博士联合培养的两年，有段时间自己摸索R语言，无意搜到了你的网站。看了所有内容后，觉得你很聪明，瞬间觉得IT男（哈哈，抱歉这么说）太男神了。回国后找工作也受到很大打击，现在也很忙。去年不知在哪看到你离开RStudio，觉得很感慨。不过今天得知你在瑞士，也很开心。瑞士很漂亮。希望你一切安好。

感谢！虽然现在已经不怎么写R了但是您一直是我刚入门编程时的一个精神导师，读研那会经常会看你的动态。祝一切都好！

I cannot wrap my head around this. How does a company like Posit not have a role for someone as supremely talented, creative and successful in creating useful products as you so obviously are? Anyway, good things happen to good people and I hope this only means that you thrive even more than before.

Dear Hui,

I am very sorry hear that! Wocao, tamen hai youmeiyou renxing, ni zheme youxiu de ren, juran gei kaichule ,wo zende shi xiangbutong, wo nianji bini xiaodian ,danshi qingkuang he ni chabuduo, kandao ni zhezhongqingkuang ,turan xiangdao wo ye gongzuo shinian le, ruguo zhende youyitian wo ye turan bei gongsi kaichule de hua, wo zhende xiangku! Dangran,xianzai shuozhexie keneng meiyou shenme yong, wo haishi yaoshuo ,ni jiushi wo yanzhong zuibang de bangyang! Wo dang laoshi shiduonianle, jingchang zai wo de ketangshang butong chengdu de tijini, wo er huo!

Best Wishes!

Laizi yiming chongqing jiaoshi songshang de lingleide guanhuai!

Dude, we are waiting for posts on your Bluesky account!

Hey a perfect job for you just opened up. Would love to see you go back as Senior Software Engineer, Shiny for Posit, PBC again. See https://posit.co/job-detail/?gh_jid=6497998003

sad to hear that..

Has this something to do with Posits new corporate strategy to move away from open source and develop more licensed products? Just wondering.

Thanks for the incredible work, Yihui! RStudio would not shine the way it does without your extraordinary work.

我怎么才看到消息！！好难过没帮上忙！！不过更好的消息是危机解除！！！我以后要关注得更勤一点！！！！

I'm really sorry to hear about what you went through, but I’m grateful for everything you’ve contributed, especially R Markdown, which has had a huge impact on how I work. Your writing always manages to be thoughtful, often humorous, and surprisingly uplifting.

If you ever have a moment, I’d be honored if you took a look at my small open-source project. It’s still in its early stages, but I’d truly value your thoughts and would be thrilled if it aligned with anything you're interested in supporting.

I’m reading this very late, but I wanted to tell you that a group of Peruvian public servants (people who work for the State) have learned a lot from the documents you’ve written, and you’ve inspired many projects where open-source resources are used to automate workflows—using R Markdown, mail-merge combinations, among other tools. I am a lawyer who learned to program thanks to you.

Your work didn’t stop at helping me: at my university, Universidad Científica del Sur in Lima, we’ve now started legal-tech courses for law students, where we integrate the kinds of workflows you’ve pioneered as part of the syllabus for “LegalTech / Tech & Law”. These students are learning how to combine R, automation, and legal-tech concepts so they can build practical solutions in the public sector (yes—the same public-sector world where I work).

Thank you for doing what you do. It may seem niche, but it creates real ripples.

Warm regards from Lima,
Dante Ramon Guerrero Barreto.

I feel like RStudio is not as user friendly as before: I just want to update my website, but I cannot find the 'new post' tab on the top. I have to turn to ChatGPT's help to find it. My last post was on 10/25/2025-everything was fine back then. it has changed so much within less than a month! I wonder why???????

Dear Yihui, thank you for creating knitr and other down packages that help me alot in learning and applying R to my work. Today I got an email from Posit that bookdown website will be cancelled in next month (Jan 2026). I cannot beleive why they stop this very useful service and require authors him/herself has to migrate to new their platform. Then I googled about this decision and find out that you-the author of knitr and rmarkdown that left RStudio one year ago. Wow, this surprises me and make me think more about the Posit after change their name from RStudio. Anyway, this is the life, anything can change suddenly, I hope you are happy and find new way to contribute your best idea for community. Thank you.

Hi Yihui,
I am sorry to bother you again. I have the same issue as the one here at: https://github.com/yihui/knitr/issues/2025?utm_source=chatgpt.com
That was reported about 4 years ago, I wonder if there is any upate about it.
Thanks!
Happy New Year!

Hi everyone,

I've tried my best to respond to the comments here (I should've done it earlier) . For those who are curious about my past two years, I've written a summary here: https://yihui.org/en/2026/01/hello-world/

I know this thread may have generated tons of Github notifications to your inbox (although there's an unsubscribe button at top right on Github). My apologies for having used so much of your time and attention!

Once again, thanks a millions for all your warm words, kind wishes, and generous support!

Yihui