The inaugural rainbowR virtual conference took place online on February 25-26, 2026, bringing together LGBTQIA+ users of R and their allies to promote their work and foster connections. The conference featured fifteen talks across two keynotes, six regular talks, and seven lightning talks, alongside four workshops and social events. I attended the talks day on February 26th, which ran from 4pm to 9:30pm UTC.

Keynotes

The day opened with an introduction by Ella Kaye, followed by the first keynote from Daphna Harel, titled Studying queer data while living it: Positionality, power, and practice. Her talk explored what it means for queer researchers to study data about queer lives, examining the interplay of positionality, data as power, and research practice through case studies on sexual orientation and gender identity measures in surveys.

The closing keynote was delivered by Hadley Wickham, who presented Claude Code for R. He demonstrated how Claude Code and Opus 4.5 AI assistance can improve R code quality and velocity, featuring examples from the testthat and dbplyr projects. Given that I use Claude Code extensively in my own R development workflow, it was particularly interesting to see how Hadley approaches the same tools in the context of widely-used packages.

Talks

The talks were split across two sessions, with a birds-of-a-feather networking break in between.

In the first session, Chris Battiston presented on intersectionality in LGBTQ+ health research using UpSet plots in R, showing how overlapping identities in health datasets can be visualized to surface disparities in participation and outcomes. Jasmine Daly shared her experience building a Pitch card game Shiny app using Claude Code, reflecting on when AI suggestions succeed or fail. Njoki Njuki and Tamires Martins presented the LGBTQ+ Movies Explorer, a Shiny app analyzing LGBTQ+ representation in films using the tidyrainbow database with text mining and an integrated chatbot.

The lightning talks featured seven short presentations. Hannah Frick spoke about the pointblank package for data validation. Hanne Oberman presented on visualization of incomplete and imputed data. Other lightning talks covered topics ranging from building LGBTQ+ community at work to teaching pharmacokinetics with R and creating 3D visuals with NYC open climate data.

In the second session, Joshua Gutoskie outlined Statistics Canada’s structured migration from SAS to R, addressing data integrity, team capacity, and organizational challenges. Ryan Timpe used the tidymodels ecosystem to construct a marketing mix model with a Golden Girls theme. J. Audra Williams introduced a psychometric instrument measuring queer sense of belonging in higher education across four dimensions.

Workshops (February 25th)

Though I did not attend the workshops day, the conference offered four sessions: an Introduction to R (led by Allissa Dillman and Padmashri Saravanan), an R package development workshop by Rhian Davies, a session on LLMs in R for data analysis by Nic Crane, and a workshop on visualising the UK’s LGBTQ+ population by Kirstie Ken English and Nicola Rennie.

Reflections

The rainbowR conference stood out for its welcoming atmosphere and the breadth of applications presented. The talks ranged from psychometric validation to marketing mix models to legacy code migration, all united by the R ecosystem and a commitment to LGBTQ+ visibility in the data science community. The mix of technical depth and community building made for a conference that felt both productive and inclusive. It was encouraging to see Claude Code featured prominently in multiple talks, reflecting how AI-assisted development is becoming part of the R community’s everyday toolkit.