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The Daily HaiQu

A newsletter about improving the systems we use in the GxPs

I'm Brendan Hyland. I help regulated facilities transform their software, spreadsheets, workflows and documents from time-consuming, deviation-invoking, regulatory burdens, to the competitive advantage they were meant to be. Join me every weekday as we take a few minutes to explore, design, test and improve the critical systems we use in our facilities.

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Featured Post

Encapsulating functionality behind a well-defined interface

Most traditional programming languages provide several ways to abstract away complexities of code, and instead present a well defined interface. What does that mean? Well, in simple terms it’s a restricted set of entry points into that code that make it clear how you can interact with it. Was this email forwarded to you? Subscribe Here! Take, for example, a web page with a form that takes your username and password. The interface is made up of the username field, the password field, a ‘forgot...

6 months ago • 1 min read

Last time we learned about the difference between an electronic signature - basically any way of signing a document electronically - and a digital signature, which is a cryptographic mechanism that can be used to implement electronic signatures, among other things. Modern digital signatures most often use the Public Key Infrastructure, or PKI, to generate and verify keys. So for you to properly e-sign your document (and I'm really simplifying things for illustration here) you need three...

about 15 hours ago • 1 min read

There are several levels of 'signatures' that you can apply to an electronic document. The first and most basic is just an image of your written signature. One common option for this is to print the document, sign and scan it back in again. A more convenient version is to have an image of your signature saved that you can paste into documents. This is what many free versions of pdf software and word processors offer as a basic document signing option - a 'stamp' of your saved signature image....

3 days ago • 2 min read

Ever since COVID, document and signing workflows have been incorporated into everything. Dropbox has it. Microsoft Teams has it. Google Workspaces has it. If you need e-signatures, you probably have access to Docusign, Adobe, Hellosign, and so on. But what exactly are we talking about when we say "document and signing workflow"? Let's step back. Most document workflows are about moving some work through review, commentary, revision and approval. The old way to do this was to send a document...

7 days ago • 1 min read

So far in our "Let's Automate" series we've managed to make some very simple, but powerful automation improvements to our own day-to-day task. Hopefully this process will give us some insights that we can bring to designing, validating or auditing our regulated processes. Version one of my process was pretty good, but there were some glaring gaps still that require some manual grunt-work to complete. For example I need to find and move drafts and images between my desktop and ConvertKit. I...

8 days ago • 1 min read

We are in the middle of our "Let's Automate" series to see if we can make some simple automation improvements to our own day-to-day tasks. Hopefully this process will give us some insights that we can bring to designing, validating or auditing our regulated processes. Today, let's review what we have so far. I'm going to call this "Version 1" since it's actually quite workable as it is. Here it is in a diagram: The Automated Daily HaiQu (Version 1) A trigger that reminds me when to run the...

9 days ago • 1 min read

One of the most useful methods for reducing the time and effort a common task can take is to eliminate boilerplate. Today, we're going to look at any writing that's necessary for the task that we're automating, and we're going to try to reduce the effort that goes into that writing as much as possible. Boilerplate is any text or structure that is the same every time, but for whatever reason, necessary. It can range from phrases that you repeat a lot to document section headers, title pages...

10 days ago • 2 min read

We are in the middle of a group exercise to see if we can make some automation improvements to our own day-to-day tasks. Hopefully this process will give us some insights that we can bring to designing, validating or auditing our regulated processes. Last time, we chose our platform and did some rewording of our simple task's SOP to specifically include links to the various input files, workspaces and websites that we will need to access while performing the task. With that simple step, we...

14 days ago • 2 min read

We left things off playing along in a group exercise to see if we can make some automation improvements to our own day-to-day tasks. Last time, we went through a questionnaire of sorts, and I left you to ponder over my answers for an SOP that hopefully improves my daily writing habit. Today we’re going to choose a platform, and start reworking our SOP to leverage some low-hanging fruit. Platform, you say? What are you talking about? I glad you asked. When I say “choose a platform” I’m...

15 days ago • 2 min read
green and brown robot toy

This week we’re on playing along in a group exercise to see if we can make some automation improvements to our own day-to-day tasks. Last time, we started listing our inputs and outputs. Today I'm just going to show my work and give you some in-depth insight into my task so you can see how we use this information in the next steps. Here's what I have so far with my task: Task: Write and publish a HaiQu daily email. Review my idea list and the past few posts. What am I going to write about...

28 days ago • 2 min read

This week we’re on playing along in group exercise to see if we can make some automation improvements to our own day-to-day tasks. Don’t worry, you won’t be called upon to present your findings to everyone. But if at any point you’d like to email me your thoughts or questions, please do! At this point you should have a file that contains the title of your task and a bare-bones list of steps that need to be done to accomplish that task. Here’s what I have from yesterday’s task: Task: Write and...

30 days ago • 1 min read
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