Jonathan

@jmcphers.bsky.social

Software architect @posit.co. Also music, kids, books, bicycling, and goodness knows what else. Opinions my own. He/him

A couple of days ago someone said "bear with me" and I had a great idea for a reality TV show called Bear With Me about a guy with a literal bear as a pet In every episode the guy goes to a different place with the bear and acts nonchalant about it while everyone else loses their minds

Latest version of Positron can open xlsx files in the data viewer(!) and it has a dropdown menu now for previewing different formats of #QuartoPub documents And—most importantly, but also from a few weeks ago, so less new—the plots panel can pick up dimensions from chunk options!!!! #rstats

An excel file of R's penguins data loaded into the data viewer in PositronA "Preview Format…" dropdown menuA screenshot of an image set to be 5x3 in the Quarto chunk options, automatically displaying as 5x3 in the plot panel

When we started working on Positron, we began by asking "what did we always want to do in RStudio, but couldn't"? Years of community upvotes on RStudio's issue tracker helped us form that wishlist. Here's how some big ideas made their way to Positron: opensource.posit.co/blog/2026-06...

RStudio's Top Feature Requests ... In Positron

Many of the most upvoted RStudio feature requests are already implemented in Positron, and we explore ten of them.

opensource.posit.co

We're delighted to announce Jonathan McPherson – software architect at Posit – as keynote speaker at posit::conf(2025)! If you're curious about how thoughtful design principles can improve the data science tools you use, you won't want to miss this! Join us Sep 16-18 in Atlanta. pos.it/conf

12 year old: *shows me an elaborate PowerPoint presentation he made for a game show called "The Rice is Right", in which contestants must watch a short, close-up video clip of a granular substance and guess whether it is rice* Me: 12 year old: This idea came to me in a dream

Buck up, baby blowfish. Just puff up bigger than your sadness and scare it right off. That's the only way to live in the awful old ocean. -- Cathrynne M. Valente, Radiance

Dear Manufacturers of Children's Drinkware and Manufacturers of Garbage Disposals, One of you needs to change the diameter of your product. I don't care who. Sincerely, Every Parent in the World

If you're working on software meant to last a long time, use long, unique names for all non-local identifiers (functions, classes, etc.). Future You is gonna need to find references, and Future You is only going to be able to use "find string".