Isabella Velásquez
Software by Isabella Velásquez#
Events attended by Isabella Velásquez#
Posts and resources by Isabella Velásquez#
How to use Positron’s GitHub integration | Isabella Velásquez & Libby Heeren | Data Science Lab
The Data Science Lab is a live weekly call. Register at pos.it/dslab! Discord invites go out each week on lives calls. We’d love to have you!
The Lab is an open, messy space for learning and asking questions. Think of it like pair coding with a friend or two. Learn something new, and share what you know to help others grow.
On this call, Libby Heeren and Isabella Velasquez walk through collaborating in Positron using the GitHub integrations and extensions. They show starting a project, protecting the main branch, opening and closing issues, creating and deleting branches, stashing and popping changes, resolving merge conflicts, opening and reviewing pull requests, and more.
Hosting crew from Posit: Libby Heeren, Isabella Velasquez, Isabel Zimmerman
Isabella’s Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/ivelasq3.bsky.social Libby’s Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/libbyheeren.bsky.social Isabella’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ivelasq/ Libby’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/libbyheeren/
Resources mentioned in the video: Positron → https://positron.posit.co/ VS Code Source Control → https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/sourcecontrol/overview Positron “create issues” triggers (add your own, too!) → positron://settings/githubIssues.createIssueTriggers GitHub → https://github.com/ Linking a GitHub issue to a pull request → https://docs.github.com/en/issues/tracking-your-work-with-issues/using-issues/linking-a-pull-request-to-an-issue GitHub commands for PRs → https://docs.github.com/en/issues/tracking-your-work-with-issues/using-issues/linking-a-pull-request-to-an-issue Git → https://git-scm.com/ Quarto → https://quarto.org/ GitHub Pull Requests and Issues Extension → https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=GitHub.vscode-pull-request-github Azure DevOps → https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/devops/ Happy Git with R → https://happygitwithr.com/ Software Carpentry Git → https://swcarpentry.github.io/git-novice/
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Timestamps of Questions / Topics 00:00 Introduction 02:56 Creating a Quarto book project in Positron 05:54 Initializing a Git repository and publishing to GitHub 06:49 Creating a .gitignore file 08:00 “Do you have to create a GitHub account before starting this kind of project?” 11:53 Staging changes and making the initial commit 13:34 Adding a collaborator on GitHub 14:25 Setting up branch protection rules 15:25 “Was that push to GitHub the initialization of the GitHub repo?” “What if you already had a GitHub repo with that same name, would you get a warning in positron?” 18:50 Working with pull requests and issues directly in Positron 20:18 Cloning an existing repository 24:09 Undoing your last commit 24:41 Stashing staged changes 25:12 Creating a new branch 26:03 Applying changes by popping a stash 27:03 Creating a pull request 28:37 How to put your activity bar in Positron to the top 29:40 Reviewing and merging a pull request 32:46 Deleting local and remote branches 36:08 “Are there benefits to doing things within positron vs the GitHub UI?” 39:13 “Do you know how to delete a branch if it’s an older rogue branch?” 41:40 Using keywords to automatically create GitHub issues 43:24 “Is the functionality similar if you’re working with an internal organization like Azure DevOps version of Git?” 44:12 “What is the best way to get an orientation into the world of Git and GitHub?” 46:42 Pulling and synchronizing branches 49:01 How to resolve merge conflicts
Strategic Budget Optimization through Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM)
Stop guessing which channels drive growth.
Join Isabella Velásquez and Daniel Chen for this end-to-end workflow demo on modeling marketing spend, building ‘what-if’ scenario planners in Shiny, and deploying automated Quarto reports that give non-technical stakeholders a clear, data-backed view of ROI.
We will explore:
- The Workflow Architecture: A look at the “plumbing” required to move from data to insights.
- The Interface: Wrapping an existing model in a Shiny dashboard for real-time “what-if” scenario planning.
- The Delivery: Automating communication via Quarto reports to keep stakeholders aligned.
- The Deployment: Using Posit Connect to turn your code into an accessible business asset for leaders.
This workflow demo grew out of the incredible energy at our recent Data Science Hangout with Ryan Timpe at LEGO. We were so inspired by the community’s interest in MMM that we decided to build this session to address your specific questions. Thank you for the great discussion. We’re excited to show you what we’ve put together!
Demo References MMM Demo GitHub Repo (https://github.com/chendaniely/dashboard-mmm ) MMM Demo Dashboard (https://danielchen-dashboard-mmm.share.connect.posit.cloud/ ) Ryan Timpe’s posit::conf(2023) talk, tidymodels: Adventures in Rewriting a Modeling Pipeline - posit::conf(2023) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7XNqcCZnLg )
MMM Resources Bayesian Media Mix Modeling for Marketing Optimization, PyMC Labs (https://www.pymc-labs.com/blog-posts/bayesian-media-mix-modeling-for-marketing-optimization ) Modernizing MMM: Best Practices for Marketers, IAB (https://www.iab.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/IAB_Modernizing_MMM_Best_Practices_for_Marketers_December_2025.pdf ) The Future of Media Mix Modeling, Measured (https://info.measured.com/hubfs/Guides/Measured_Guide%20The%20Future%20of%20Media%20Mix%20Modeling.pdf?hsCtaAttrib=184767817336 ) Media Mix Modeling: How to Measure the Effectiveness of Advertising, Hajime Takeda, PyData (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4U_PUTasPQ ) An Analyst’s Guide to MMM, Meta (https://facebookexperimental.github.io/Robyn/docs/analysts-guide-to-MMM/ ) Full Python Tutorial: Bayesian Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) SPECIAL GUEST: PyMC Labs, Matt Dancho (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJ_qq_IVUgg ) Reading MMM Outputs: Dashboards and Decisions for Small Teams, SmartSMSSolutions (https://smartsmssolutions.com/resources/blog/business/reading-mmm-dashboards-article )
Positron: The First Five Minutes (Isabella Velásquez, Posit) | posit::conf(2025)
Isabella Velásquez from the developer relations team at Posit introduces Positron, a comprehensive tool that integrates coding, documentation, and command line functionalities.
posit::conf(2025) Subscribe to posit::conf updates: https://posit.co/about/subscription-management/
Building Tailored Dashboards: Drill Down Visualizations and LLM-Powered Summaries with Shiny
Led by Isabella Velásquez, Sr Product Marketing Manager at Posit PBC
Scenario: Imagine the weekly scramble at DemoCo. Isabella, a lonely Marketing analyst, spends hours every Friday manually compiling marketing lead performance data from Salesforce, website logs, and event records into a sprawling Excel report. The tedious, redundant process is both a time sink and a bottleneck.
Marketing Leadership, who need to identify top-performing platforms, find the mass amount of information in the report confusing. They constantly return to Isabella for clarification or, even worse, don’t reach back out and make misinformed decisions on critical budget allocation. Determined, Isabella decides it’s finally time to automate and tailor this critical dashboard, and save headaches for both Leadership and herself.
In this demo, you will learn how to:
- Transform redundant, manual, error-prone data compilation into an automated lead performance dashboard with Shiny
- Integrate diverse marketing data sources for a holistic view
- Build tailored marketing KPI dashboards that address Leadership’s specific questions
- Use drill-downs, data visualizations, and LLM-powered summaries to reduce data overload and clarify complex takeaways instantly 5.Provide flexibility in dashboard functionality to meet diverse preferences and needs, from pre-selected insights derived directly from the data to implementing an LLM-powered analytics option
Helpful resources:
- Demo Slides: https://github.com/ivelasq/2025-06-25_marketing-demo/blob/main/README.md
- Demo Marketing Dashboard: https://pub.current.posit.team/public/marketing-demo/
- GitHub Repo (including links to packages used: pointblank, querychat, etc.): https://github.com/ivelasq/2025-06-25_marketing-demo?tab=readme-ov-file
If you have specific follow-up questions about using Posit in your organization, we’d love to chat with you: https://posit.co/schedule-a-call/
Quarto with brand.yml with Isabella Velásquez
Slides: https://ivelasq-branded-quarto.share.connect.posit.cloud/
Maintaining a consistent brand identity across data science outputs is essential for clear communication and a professional image. This talk introduces brand.yml, a powerful new tool designed to streamline adherence to organizational style guides within the Quarto publishing system. brand.yml simplifies the creation of visually consistent materials that perfectly align with your organization’s brand guidelines in HTML reports, presentations, websites, and dashboards.
We’ll explore how brand.yml allows you to define your brand’s visual identity, including colors, fonts, logos, and more, in a single, centralized location. You will learn how to integrate this configuration file into your Quarto projects, automatically applying the defined style guide to various outputs like reports, presentations, websites, and more. Beyond basic integration, I’ll share practical tips and demonstrate tools that simplify the process of designing and managing your brand.yml file to make brand customization even easier.
Join us to discover how brand.yml can elevate your Quarto documents to a new level of professionalism to ensure that your work is more impactful and on-brand
R-Ladies Rome (English) - Interactive R, Python, and Shiny in the Browser with Quarto and Shinylive
In this session, Isabella Velásquez walks us through Quarto Live and Shinylive, powerful tools that allow us to create interactive R, Python, and Shiny applications without a server. These technologies make it easier than ever to share dynamic, engaging data science projects directly in the browser.
What You’ll Learn
️ How Quarto Live brings interactive code to static documents ️ How Shinylive allows Shiny apps to run entirely in the browser ️ Practical use cases for data science, education, and collaboration
This talk is ideal for data scientists, educators, and open-source enthusiasts who want to make their work more interactive and accessible.
To further explore the subject, we recommend visiting the presentation of the talk : https://ivelasq.github.io/2025-02-21_r-python-shiny-in-the-browser
More about the Speaker:
0:00 R-Ladies Rome Chapter Intro 5:00 Isabella’s Talk
Please visit: https://rladiesrome.org
Create Quarto dashboards with Python
Learn how to create Quarto dashboards with Python! Senior Product Marketing Manager Isabella Velásquez walks through building a Quarto dashboard from scratch, using water insecurity data from the TidyTuesday project. You’ll learn how to structure a Quarto document, preview dashboards, and customize layouts and themes. See Isabella’s code here: https://github.com/ivelasq/water-insecurity-dashboard And the dashboard here: https://ivelasq-water-insecurity-dashboard.share.connect.posit.cloud/
Resources:
Quarto dashboards guide: https://quarto.org/docs/dashboards/ Posit Connect Cloud: connect.posit.cloud Hello, Dashboards!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HW7QbqI4fH0&t=590s TidyTuesday project: https://github.com/rfordatascience/tidytuesday Posit PydyTuesday GitHub repo: https://github.com/posit-dev/python-tidytuesday Other videos in this PydyTuesday playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9HYL-VRX0oSDQjicFMLIIdcLv5NuvDp9
#pythoncontent
How to automatically detect data changes for your Shiny Calendar app (ft: Jira, pins, Posit Connect)
Do you manage constantly changing data and need your Shiny app to automatically update?
On August 28th at 11 am ET, Isabella Velásquez demonstrated a streamlined workflow for handling frequently updated datasets in Shiny. You’ll see how to simplify your process for keeping dynamic data current and how to reflect those changes in your app or dashboard.
Github repo to follow along or make it your own! https://github.com/posit-marketing/shiny-calendar
Timestamps: 1:03 - Introduction of the project (end goal: calendar that integrates with Jira to track and visualize a schedule for managing deadlines of content) 2:26 - Pulling data from an API in Python or R 2:56 - Introduction to pins (and scheduling automatic refreshes of it in Posit Connect) 4:30 - Introduction to Shiny for both Python and R (its power lies in reactivity) 5:10 - Enter pin_reactive_read() function 6:12 - Introduction to Posit Team 6:37 - Opening a new session within Posit Workbench and overview of code needed to create the calendar [Github repo: https://github.com/posit-marketing/shiny-calendar] 12:07 - toastui package used for Calendar (ex: adding colors to labels) 12:47 - Writing clean data to Posit Connect board 13:16 - Rendered Quarto doc for pulling Jira data from the board 14:00 - Deploying Quarto to Posit Connect (using push button deployment) and scheduling to run 16:54 - Using the data just pinned in the Shiny app 21:17 - Overview of Shiny Content Calendar application 23:04 - Creating an issue in Jira board and adjusting schedule in Posit Connect to show new item in Shiny calendar. 24:00 - pin_reactive_read automatically detects change and shows it in the Shiny app
During this workflow demo, you will learn:
- How {pins} stores and retrieves ever-changing data with ease
- How to use pin_reactive_read() in Shiny to automatically trigger updates when your data changes
- How Posit Connect can be set up to rerun your {pin} on a schedule, ensuring your app is updated without disruption
- How to deploy an always-up-to-date app for seamless sharing with stakeholders
Other helpful links: pin_reactive_read: https://pins.rstudio.com/reference/pin_reactive_read.html Basic reactivity in Mastering Shiny: https://mastering-shiny.org/basic-reactivity.html#reactive-programming Understanding reactivity on the Shiny site: https://shiny.posit.co/r/articles/build/understanding-reactivity/ Github repo: https://github.com/posit-marketing/shiny-calendar Shiny Calendar: https://pub.demo.posit.team/public/shiny-calendar/ Q&A Recording
If you like these workflow demos, you can join us monthly! They happen the last Wednesday of every month at 11 am ET. Add it to your calendar here: https://pos.it/team-demo
How to automate your reporting with Quarto Dashboards and Posit Connect
Get ready to up your reporting game!
Isabella Velásquez dives into the practical side of lightweight dashboards made with Quarto, the next-generation R Markdown, and Posit Connect, our premier publishing platform.
You’ll learn how to build and automate Quarto Dashboards with Posit Connect. We’ll showcase a Python example, but the same principles apply to R, Julia, and Observable.
Helpful Links GitHub Repo: https://github.com/posit-marketing/inflation-explorer Q&A room: https://youtube.com/live/d21PQyOGlgY?feature=share For anonymous questions: https://pos.it/demo-questions Quarto dashboard documentation: https://quarto.org/docs/dashboards/ Quarto dashboard gallery: https://quarto.org/docs/dashboards/examples/ You can add the monthly recurring event to your calendar with this link: https://pos.it/team-demo
Timestamps: 1:17 - Overview of the project 2:14 - The data (Consumer Price Index released monthly by Bureau of Labor Statistics) 3:00 - The benefits of using Quarto 5:41 - Introducing Quarto dashboards 7:17 - Navigation bar and pages in Quarto dashboards 7:30 - Dashboard Layout: Rows 7:47 - Dashboard Layout: Columns 8:00 - Tabsets in Quarto dashboards 8:16 - Sidebars in Quarto dashboards 8:25 - Cards in Quarto dashboards 9:50 - Theming in Quarto 10:38 - Today’s dashboard on BLS Data 11:30 - Options for deploying Quarto dashboards 11:50 - Posit Connect overview 13:02 - Demo starting in GitHub repo for project 14:15 - Creating a virtual environment for the project 15:50 - Scheduling a script to run when we know new data is coming in (using pins on Posit Connect) 19:17 - Publishing a script to Posit Connect from VS Code 20:15 - Adding environmental variables to Posit Connect 25:30 - Final dashboard reveal
R-Ladies Rome (English) - What’s new in the tidyverse - Isabella Velasquez
Welcome to R-Ladies Rome Chapter!
What’s new in the tidyverse - Speaker: Isabella Velasquez
In this video, Isabella will tell you about What’s new in the tidyverse, a suite of packages that’s revolutionized data wrangling, visualization, and analysis. Recently, Tidyverse has undergone some changes and updates to make it even more user-friendly and powerful. The changes to Tidyverse include new packages, updates to existing ones, and improvements in performance and functionality. Some of the most notable updates include enhancements to package dependencies, performance improvements for specific functions such as group_by(), and the addition of new packages such as ggplot2, readr and dplyr.
You can find the latest news here: https://bit.ly/3z9BcMR To follow Isabella Velásquez: Twitter: twitter.com/ivelasq3 LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/ivelasq/
Materials: GitHub repo: https://bit.ly/3LHVSmS Website: https://bit.ly/3M5gE03 The tidyverse blog: https://www.tidyverse.org/blog/
Quarto with the Quarto Team | An Open-Source Chat
Join Al Manning, Carlos SchIidegger, & Charles Teague, members of the Quarto Team, as they take our questions.
Quarto is an open-source tool for scientific and technical publishing. Create dynamic content with Python, R, Julia, and Observable. Author documents as plain text markdown or Jupyter notebooks. Publish high-quality articles, reports, presentations, websites, blogs, and books in HTML, PDF, MS Word, ePub, and more. Author with scientific markdown, including equations, citations, crossrefs, figure panels, callouts, advanced layout, and more.
Key Resources: ⬡ Learn more and get started with Quarto at quarto.org
Contact ⬡ Bug reports and feature requests - https://github.com/quarto-dev/quarto-cli/issues ⬡ Need help? Github discussions - https://github.com/quarto-dev/quarto-cli/discussions
Introduction Videos for Quarto ⬡ Mine and Julia talk, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7Hxu4coDl8 ⬡ Quarto Series, 1️⃣ Welcome to Quarto Workshop led by Tom Mock: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvi5uXQMvu4 2️⃣ Building a Blog with Quarto led by Isabella Velásquez: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVcvXfRyfE0&feature=youtu.be 3️⃣ Beautiful reports and presentations with Quarto led by Tom Mock: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbf7Ai3jnxY&feature=youtu.be
Timestamps
00:00:00 Introductions
2:55 Why open source?
6:20 Can we expect to see Quarto available to R-users via CRAN any time soon?
9:10 Quarto and Google Docs?
9:49 Lua filters/shortcodes. Advice for a good development environment for prototyping and debugging?
14:59 Is there a single documentation page for ALL the quarto-specific YAML options? https://quarto.org/docs/reference
16:15 Navigating Quarto’s documentation.
18:00 Is there something like Observable SQL cells on the roadmap?
20:10 Is there something closer to {bookdown} for Quarto? What is the best way to retain data and environment objects in a quarto book? Is there any path to enabling this? See Includes, https://quarto.org/docs/authoring/includes.html
24:20 Flexdashboard? Coming soon.
26:30 A big challenge in the adoption is that Quarto is competing with ipython notebooks for mindspace, what does the Quarto team think about that? Quarto and Jupyter Notebooks will hopefully be thought of as complementary to one another, with Quarto helping a lot with narrative, layout, and appearance for publication and sharing.
30:10 Where should I go to contact you about an issue? What if the issue isn’t just Quarto, say, Quarto + Jupyter?
31:50: What is the Quarto team hoping to see the community produce? Feedback, reporting in github issues. Quarto Extensions.
34:05 Custom styling, configuring grid options. Any tips or anything in the roadmap that will help users finetune the look and feel of their output?
38:40 Terminology question; what do we call a published Quarto doc? (or webpage, blog, etc.?)
40:00 How do I stay up to date with Quarto? Getting the latest release and learning about what is new?
See what’s up on quarto.org. Look under get-started and under downloads for pre-releases
Create & Publish a Quarto Blog on Quarto Pub in 100 Seconds | Quarto Pub
Thomas Mock, Quarto Product Manager, walks you through how to build a simple blog with Quarto and share it with the world on quarto.pub, all in less than two minutes.
Quarto is the multi-language publishing system. It also allows you to publish executable code blocks to include R, Python, Julia, or Observable JS output in your blog posts (and many other formats).
Quarto websites and blogs are particularly excellent ways to develop your technical skills and share your learnings with the world.
Resources, ⬡ Creating a Quarto Blog, https://quarto.org/docs/websites/website-blog.html ⬡ Publishing to Quarto Pub, https://quarto.org/docs/publishing/quarto-pub.html ⬡ Customize your Quarto blog or Website. This example creates and deploys a simple Quarto blog template, but there are ways to customize and style your content. Isabella Velásquez walks through this in detail at the Sept 2022 meetup, https://youtu.be/CVcvXfRyfE0 ⬡ Learn more about Quarto at quarto.org.
Requirements,
- To publish from the RStudio IDE, you’ll need to be working on a recent version of RStudio, v2022.07.1 or later.
- You may also work from Jupyter Labs, VS Code, or a notebook integrated with the Quarto CLI
Building a Blog with Quarto | Led by Isabella Velásquez, RStudio
Led by Isabella Velásquez
A few helpful links upfront: Quarto documentation https://quarto.org/ Meetup presentation: https://rstd.io/build-quarto-blog Blog exercise GitHub repo https://rstd.io/quarto-blog-exercise-repo Blog exercise Cloud project https://rstd.io/quarto-blog-exercise-cloud Upcoming events: rstd.io/community-events Welcome to Quarto Workshop: https://youtu.be/yvi5uXQMvu4
For the examples above, please ensure you are running Quarto Version: 1.0 or higher.
Timestamps: (to be updated) 42:03 - Add a blog post
Abstract: A blog is a fantastic opportunity to record your data stories, gain exposure for your expertise, and support others in their data science journey. In this talk, I will discuss building a blog with Quarto. Quarto is the multi-language, next-generation publishing system from RStudio, with many new features and capabilities. Quarto websites include integrated support for blogging. You can quickly get up and running with a blog and focus on customization and style. Quarto also allows you to publish executable code blocks to include R, Python, Julia, or Observable JS output in your blog posts.
Speaker Bio: I am a content strategist, data enthusiast, and author. My main goal is to drive engagement around all the awesome things happening at RStudio
Isabella Velásquez | Building a Blog with R | RStudio
Building a Blog With R Presented by: Isabella Velásquez
Here are a bunch of resources Isabella shared ⤵️
Slides from the presentation: https://lnkd.in/gqGFmHMf Internal Blog Example: https://lnkd.in/gaFPxN5F Other resources from the talk: https://lnkd.in/gjXxeMaa
Distill Resources: 1️⃣ Distill for R Markdown: https://lnkd.in/gWsEBXfN 2️⃣ Building a blog with distill by Tom Mock: https://lnkd.in/gQiE8PC2 3️⃣ (Re-)introducing Distill for R Markdown: https://lnkd.in/gzidDpV2 4️⃣ The distillery: https://lnkd.in/gwDAg_7G 5️⃣ Postcards package: https://lnkd.in/geT6uB9t
Blogdown Resources:
1️⃣ blogdown: Creating Websites with R Markdown: https://lnkd.in/gGQ-fCWw 2️⃣ Hugo Themes: https://themes.gohugo.io/ 3️⃣Hugo Apéro: https://lnkd.in/g8U9tfvq 4️⃣ A Blogdown New Post Workflow with Github and Netlify: https://lnkd.in/gYNwsKTm
The R programming language is known for its applications to data science, but one of its best assets is the inviting community. Folks from around the world share their lessons learned, best practices, and code to support and inspire others. One tool that helps contribute to the thriving community is the blog.
A blog is a wonderful opportunity to record your data stories, gain exposure for your expertise, and support others in their R journey. Thanks to the advancement of tools like R Markdown, you can quickly get up and running with a blog and focus on customization and style.
In this talk, we will discuss possible reasons for creating a blog, the pros and cons of a blog, and how to decide on topics. We will then explore tools for creating your blog that make it easy to showcase your R skills, such as blogdown and distill.
At RStudio, we are always looking for stories of how you are using R for your work, community, or for fun. If this talk inspires you to start writing, we would love for you to contribute to the RStudio blog: https://www.rstudio.com/blog/
Speaker Bio: Isabella Velásquez: Isabella is a content strategist, author, and active member of the R community. Currently, she works at RStudio as a Sr. Product Marketing Manager with the goal of driving engagement around all the awesome things happening at RStudio. In her previous role, she conducted data analysis and research, developed infrastructure to support use of data, and created resources to engage technical and non-technical audiences. She channels these experiences to illuminate what is possible with great products
