RStudio’s mission from the beginning has been to create powerful tools that support the practices and techniques required for creating trustworthy, high quality analysis. For many years Hadley Wickham has been teaching and working on his own set of tools for R with many of the same core goals. We’ve been collaborating quite a bit with Hadley over the past couple of years and today we’re excited to announce that Hadley, Winston Chang, and Garrett Grolemund are joining RStudio so we can continue to work together much more closely.

You probably know Hadley from his work on ggplot2, plyr, and many other packages. Garrett was a PhD student of Hadley’s at Rice, and you might also know him from the lubridate package, which makes dealing with dates and time easier; he’s also been working on new tools for visualisation and new ways of thinking about the process of data analysis. Winston has been working full-time on ggplot2 for the last couple of months, squashing many bugs and repaying a lot of the technical debt that’s accumulated over the years. Winston’s also writing an R Graphics Cookbook for O’Reilly that should be available in the near future.

What does this mean for RStudio? We’ll of course continue developing open-source software like the RStudio IDE, ggplot2, and plyr (among many other projects). One of Hadley’s core focuses at RStudio will also be expanding our mission to include education, which we plan to offer in a variety of formats ranging from in-person training to some innovative new online courses. We’ll also be working on hosted services (like RPubs) as well as some new products that address the challenges of deploying R within larger organizations.

We’re all excited to begin this next phase of work together and will have lots more details to announce later this fall!