tidywater (water chemistry) and building packages using base R

Hello Denver R Ladies!

Please join us on November 4th for a cozy evening of R talks showcasing the awesome work of R users in Denver and surrounding areas.

Doors open at 6:30 p.m., presentations start at 7:00 p.m. We hope to see you there!

This event is co-hosted by Denver R Ladies and Denver R Users.

Introduction to the tidywater package
Libby McKenna and Sierra Johnson - Brown and Caldwell

Our package (available on CRAN), tidywater, consolidates public models for water treatment modeling. This package was developed to address the need for a common modeling platform for our industry, drinking water engineering, which previously required assembling results from multiple tools. Additionally, an R Shiny webapp was developed for people who want to access the models, but don't have the time to learn R.
Libby recently presented at posit::conf 2025 in Atlanta

I'll see you data.table and tidyverse and raise you base R
Peter DeWitt - CU Anshutz/ NREL

The tools for data manipulation provided by the tidyverse's dplyr and tidyr are extremely useful, as are dcast, melt, and the set* methods for data.table. However, there is an argument to be made that base R, in some cases, can be preferable to either of these popular R dialects. In this presentation we will explore a specific example where base R methods can be preferable and how to build R packages to support different dialects without dependencies or imports.