One of my favorite podcasts, JavaScript Jabber, does a segment at the end of every episode where everyone talks about a few of their recent favorite things. I’ve discovered tons of great blog posts, books, movies, research studies, all kinds of stuff, through the segment and I thought it would be fun to do my own weekly picks. So, here is episode 1!

Robot & Frank

This movie is set in the nearish future. The set isn’t slickly futuristic and unrecognizable - there are still smartphones, video calls sometimes suck, there are both tiny smartcars and ordinary sedans. This future is a subtle, relatable one, which I think made the film much more moving. The story follows Frank, an elderly retired burglar, and a healthcare robot given to him by his son as Frank struggles with dementia. Frank realizes he can manipulate the robot into helping him plan robberies, while the robot manipulates him into doing things that are good for his health.

There were many aesthetically beautiful shots and warm, funny moments despite the sad subject matter. The interaction between Robot and the humans is definitely the strong point of the movie. Frank’s relationships with his two beautiful adult children are somewhat unconvincing and underdeveloped, and not nearly as evocative as his connection with Robot. Movies about AI-human relationships tend to get to me - I loved this one, although I don’t think it executed it’s ideas nearly as clearly as Spike Jones’s Her (which is amazing and stunning and you should watch it yesterday).

Who is behind Dart?

Thomas Schranz wrote this post about the engineers behind Dart. He made a great point about why we should care about the topic:

…in a way they [programming languages and runtimes] tend to reflect the personalities and beliefs of their creators.

He listed developer sanity, developer productivity, developer tool performance, and the web as a platform as the top-level concepts that the Dart decision makers care about. I mostly agree with the list - Dart is great for developer sanity once you’re on a big enough team, making a big enough product. The same goes for developer productivity. And I’m pretty enthusiastic about the web and JavaScript as a platform. Developer tool performance I’m not incredibly on board with. I would still rather use grunt or gulp than pub transformers.

Deploying ES6

Another great blog post, from Dr. Axel Rauschmayer, goes over transpilers and transpilation details, module systems, linters, and REPLs. Great, practical roundup of cool stuff.