Ryan McDonald

I purchased this camera as a bring-everywhere point-and-shoot. It's relatively inexpensive ($45 USD currently) and yields, in my opinion, satisfactory results for the price and build quality. Effectively doubling the exposure potential of a roll of 35mm film in creative and casual shooting is STELLAR.

The H35N received several upgrades over its predecessor, the H35. A glass lens replaces a plastic single-element acrylic, along with the addition of a bulb thread to use a cable release for long exposure photography. The built-in star filter will appeal to astronomers and divas, but it also serves as a lens cover when tossed in your purse or pocket. Like its predecessor, it has a built-in flash.

There exists a 30.5mm filter thread for which I found limited creative filter options. Initially, I added a 30.5mm to 37mm step-up ring, which allowed for the attachment of a light diffusion filter—or whatever you'd like—on the camera. Unfortunately, this obstructed the viewport, affecting approximately 1/4 of the total area in the bottom right section of the frame. It was enough to frame confidently, yet also enough to annoy. I've ended up with a single 30.5mm UV filter, waving goodbye to the diffusion for now. Fotodiox sells an overwhelmingly powerful 30.5mm diffusion filter if you're into that.

If I were to change the design of this camera, it would receive metal. A more robust frame using a lightweight alloy would aid its durability, adding a tactile 'premium' feel. I wouldn't mind a little extra weight or an increase in the price tag. Additionally, the threads for mounting/tripod use are plastic. This could easily be replaced with a more durable metal. The absence of manual controls isn't necessarily an excuse for a cheaper overall build. Additionally, the bulb threading for a cable release is metal, so I am puzzled by this inconsistency.

There are many 35mm half-frame options available, with their key advantages being quality glass and manual controls. Unless you are seeking an aesthetic of reduced fidelity, this would not be the film camera for commercial contexts. If you are, a Quaker Oats pinhole might suffice. If you are comfortable embracing a loss of fidelity and seek a lightweight —perhaps the lightest— option, the value proposition offered by this camera is significant.

Between work and side projects, I've been engaging extensively with documentation. For a long time, documentation and the process of creating it felt like a necessary "evil," something appended after the fun part of a project. Something to endure and find relief in finishing. But as I've built and utilized documentation, I've come to deeply respect it and have even begun, at times, to prefer the process of documentation over its associated engineering, coding, and development.

Documentation manifests in many forms. Sometimes we write it in parallel with development, while other times it comes after. For some, it might even come before. Or, usually, it's some combination of these. Effective documentation can often make the difference between a successful product and a failure. But it can also extend beyond products and apply to anything from technical processes to design systems.

Documenting doesn't only help your users; it helps you validate your work, refine processes, and surface underlying issues.

It's important to consider the structure of information when documenting. Documentation is a form of organizational memory—the knowledge and experience that an organization has gained over time—which serves to keep yourself and those in your organization from repeating tasks, conversations, and work. It's essential to maintain effective documentation because it helps us move forward on a productive and informed trajectory. The structure of documentation is critical to its effectiveness within an organization. To produce effective documentation, a balance must be struck among precision, accuracy, conciseness, and form. Numerous resources are available to reference specifics related to a given field or project, so to keep this post brief, here are a few key takeaways to consider when producing documentation:

• Iterative and consistent: Documentation should often adapt to changing conditions in the development cycle. Flexibility, iteration, and consistency will yield better documentation.
• Quality over quantity: Verbose documentation is unnecessary. The quality of documentation is much more important than its length or quantity.
• Maintain focus: Documentation should efficiently communicate relevant information and avoid straying from its intended purpose. Defining a clear and concise focus for your documentation at the outset is helpful for tracking progress and maintaining scope.
• Understand your audience: Understanding the documentation's audience will inform its structure, design, level of detail, and many other aspects of its development.

Here are some resources I've used to guide my documentation processes:

Kitty Giraudel's Blog Post - "Technical documentation for everyone"

Ben Mullins on Medium - "Documentation: Writing it is the Worst, Having it is the Best"

Brad Frost's Blog Post - "How much documentation to include in a style guide?"

Nielson Norman Group - Documentation Articles

Google developer documentation style guide

Cedar - REI's Design System

I recently migrated my personal site from Hugo to Lume, the fast and flexible static site generator for Deno! As I'm not a very active publisher, it was quite easy to port my small collection of old blog posts to the new site, as they were initially authored in Markdown with relatively consistent metadata. Using Lume's handy _data feature, which allows you to specify data that should be applied to all files in a directory, I was able to get things set up and organized with ease. This migration has prompted me to think about data longevity and how consistent file structures aid tremendously in the long term. For now, I'm very excited to have my personal site running on Lume. In fact, I was an early Lume adopter, likely among its first users. I've used it extensively to document processes at work. It's too bad it took me this long to port over my personal site. Thanks to Lume, and especially its author, Óscar Otero, I have a fast blog built with an awesome tool! The current base template for this site is, in fact, an official Lume theme!