Back in August, I had the pleasure of attending useR! 2025 at Duke. This was both my first useR! conference and first time visiting the Carolinas; two things I’ve been meaning to tick off.
I presented on tinyplot (link), the lightweight R vizualisation library that’s consumed most of my open-source dev time over the last year and a half. I’m unreasonably pleased with the whole thing tbqh and doubly pleased to see the enthusiastic uptake by parts of the R community. Still, I’m often asked why bother investing all that time, given the existence of ggplot2 (which I too am a massive fan of). My useR! talk provides the necessary context to answer that question. Alongside many examples, I explain why I started working on tinyplot in the first place, what niche it is trying to fill, and what its unique features are.
The video of my talk has just been published, so feel free to take a look if you’ve ever wanted to learn a bit more about tinyplot. (Also: please have pity on the tall people in your life, who are forced to stare directly into the projector lights.)
P.S. The slides for my talk are available on the tinyplot website.