Time flies. 2025 is almost in the books. For the Zurich R user group 2025 started with a big change and continued with 3 well received community events. In the wake of a busy winter season, we’re moving our Q4 event to the start of next year.
At the beginning of the year we faced the challenge to walk in the big boots that legendary meetup organizers Muriel, Rachel and Dorothea had left after 8 years and more than 40 R meetup events. Hence we were happy to have Gerlinde on board who had already worked with the ceding organizers to ease the transition and work existing plans to realize the year’s first meetup at WSL. We were excited to see the big crowd that Geodata and Landscape Insights with R @WSL had drawn to the relatively remote Birmensdorf. And again, geospatial insights and visualization in particular delivered. We saw spectacular presentations from Dominque and Micah who discussed Ecological infrastructure planning and FORTE app: online tools for forests today and tomorrow.
The summer event tried out something summer vacation friendly. We focused on networking and did not invite any speakers - everyone was a speaker in our get together SummeR BeeR event.
In September, we were back to our common meetup mode and hosted a full house for the R for Mobility & Transportation Analytics at the University of Zurich. Anna Reiffer from ETH Zurich presented The R Roadmap for Mobility Behavior Analysis: From Surveys to Travel Choices and Accessibility. Samuel Wittwer from Zurich Public Transport (VBZ) explained how R is at the Heart of VBZ Mobility
With the apero season in full swing and everyone invited to their fair share of after work events from Räbeliechtli to Samichlaus and X-Mas dinners, we deciced to move our Q4 event to the beginning of next year. We are excited though to announce a topic that continues to evolve and shape the way we work with R. Our next meetup will take place at the KOF Swiss Economic Institute, ETH Zurich on January 29, 2026. The event will be dedicated to DevOps for Data Science.
Scientific Software Engineer Stéphane Bisinger from the KOF Swiss Economic Institute at ETH Zurich will show how the Institute handles Workflow and Workload Management with Airflow & Ray in a Kubernetes environment. Stéphane will highlight how the role of R evolved in the process. In the second talk, devXY founder Patrick Schratz will show how he leverages different opensource components to manage data science environments professionally for his clients. On his journey to bridge data science & devOps, Patrick has authored several R packages and runs community infrastructure in addition. In his talk we will hear about Patrick’s latest work on opensource powered R package binary builds and a new tool to host Shiny apps, APIs and more.
Event Outline