Last fall, when RStudio announced that well-known package authors Jenny Bryan and Max Kuhn were joining the company, I asked Chief Scientist Hadley Wickham what was up. "The plan isn't to add anyone else to my team in the near future," he said in late November.
It looks like the near future has passed.
Another familiar name in the R community, Gábor Csárdi, is joining Wickham's team, Wickham announced on Twitter. More specifically, Csárdi will be working at Wickham's team half time, while he continues to work on r-hub the rest of his time. r-hub, a project backed by the R Consortium, is aimed at making it easier to develop, publish and distribute R packages.
"In the short-term, [Csárdi will work on] better tools for multicore programming (which will be used in purrr and shiny);" Wickham told me by email. "and in the long-term, the full devtools ecosystem."
Csárdi is probably best known in the R community for r-hub, but he's authored other packages including igraph, a library for analyzing networks; and spark, which can create sparkline mini-visualization inside the R terminal.
"Building an #rstats deram team over there at RStudio," economist and R user JD Long tweeted in response to the news.