Davis Vaughan

Timeline

1. 2017–2019

   RStudio and the tidyverse paper

   In 2017, Vaughan joins the Business Science team, where he works on the tidyquant R financial package for sector correlations analysis. By 2018, he works as a software engineer at RStudio on modeling with Max Kuhn, and in 2019 he coauthors the Journal of Open Source Software paper “Welcome to the Tidyverse.”

2. 2020–2022

   The slider, clock, and ivs packages

   As a software engineer at RStudio in 2020, he works on modeling in the tidyverse, maintains the furrr package for parallelizing purrr code, and releases slider 0.1.0 on CRAN in February 2020 for sliding window functions. He announces the first release of the clock package for working with date-times in March 2021 and releases ivs 0.1.0 for working with intervals in April 2022.

3. 2023

   Join tools in dplyr 1.1.0

   He writes the dplyr 1.1.0 release post on joins in 2023, explaining the join_by() syntax, warnings for multiple matches, inequality joins, rolling joins, and tools for handling unmatched rows.

4. February 2025–June 2025

   The Air R code formatter

   With Lionel Henry, Vaughan announces Air in February 2025, a fast R formatter that automatically styles code. In June 2025, they announce Air 0.7.0, a roundup of releases 0.5.0 through 0.7.0 with Positron support, autobracing, and an official GitHub Action.

5. July 2025

   OpenAI console help for R

   In July 2025, he coauthors and maintains a separate CRAN package named air, an R console utility that lets users ask R-related questions to the OpenAI large language model. The utility answers how-to questions by providing code and what-is questions by explaining what given code does.

6. January 2026

   Claude Code across 200 pull requests

   Using Claude Code in January 2026, he generates roughly 200 sets of diffs across R packages, and each diff becomes a human-reviewed pull request.

7. February 2026–March 2026

   New functions in dplyr 1.2.0

   In February 2026, he writes the dplyr 1.2.0 release post introducing filter_out() as the complement to filter(). At a March 2026 Posit Data Science Lab session, he walks through the newest functions in dplyr, the problems they solve, and how decisions are made to add or replace functions.

8. As of October 2026

   Principal software engineer at Posit

   As of October 2026, Vaughan is a Principal Software Engineer at Posit working on improving the tidyverse, and he is the co-creator of the Air R code formatter.