Why BRUG Exists
I learned R because I had to. My dissertation wasn’t going to write itself, and R was the tool best suited to run the statistical analysis my research needed. What I did not expect was to end up writing the entire dissertation in R Markdown — not just the analysis, but the prose, the figures, the references, the formatting. All of it, in one reproducible document that I could rerender from scratch at any point. That experience changed how I thought about what R actually was.
That was years ago. In my current role as a Research Data Science Consultant at UW–Madison, I work with researchers, many of whom use R in their day to day work. I also maintain a Posit Connect server, publish packages to CRAN, and teach data science workshops for The Carpentries and the UW–Madison Libraries. And — because apparently I cannot help myself — I use R to track how my pottery side business is doing. Over the years I have seen R used for genomics pipelines, Shiny dashboards running in production, API wrappers, and automated reporting systems.
What I have also noticed, over those same years, is that other languages have developed a visible culture of intermediate and advanced growth. There are communities, tutorials, and spaces explicitly built for people who want to move beyond the basics — places where you can find others working at the same level, compare approaches, and keep pushing. That infrastructure exists, and it is genuinely useful.
R has an equivalent depth. The ecosystem is mature, capable, and — for researchers doing serious computational work — remarkably well suited to the full arc of a project, from raw data to published, reproducible output. But the community infrastructure that supports that depth is quieter and harder to find, at least here on campus. The result is that R users who are ready to grow often do not know where to look, or assume that the path forward runs through a different language entirely.
BRUG exists to help close that gap. Not to make the case for R over anything else, but to build a place where R users at UW–Madison can find each other, share what they know, find and offer help — victories and woes alike — and see the full range of what the language makes possible. A community of practice, grounded in the Wisconsin Idea: start on campus, stay open, propagate outward.
We are just getting started. Our first meetup is on July 7th — a soft opening, a chance to meet the people in the room and lay out what we are building together. If you write R code at UW–Madison, at any level, you belong here. Come find us.