CEO and co-founder of Kief Studio. Full-stack developer and strategist. In tech since 2012. Served as Secretary of the TRaViS board until May 2026.
https://ameliasgagne.com172 articles
Recommending infrastructure that requires dedicated engineering to maintain — to a team with none — isn't a recommendation. It's a liability with a polished interface. The gap between capability and operability is where implementations die.
Gerald Weinberg's research shows that switching between two projects costs 20% of productive capacity to each. Three projects: 40%. Founders run eight simultaneously and wonder why nothing ships.
We run our own servers, our own git, our own identity provider, our own monitoring. Not because we're paranoid — because the math works out and the control matters.
I have credentials in marketing psychology, consumer behavior, and positive psychology. Not because I wanted to be a therapist — because I wanted to understand why people do what they do.
Content clusters and pillar pages build topical authority when each URL owns one question and links on purpose. A pile of posts is not a cluster. Architecture beats volume.
The clients who consume the most capacity rarely produce the most revenue. The math on who stays is straightforward. The conversation is harder.
After fourteen years of tracking analytics across industries and platforms, the metrics that actually drive decisions have narrowed to five. Everything else is noise until one of these five tells you to look deeper.
Technology stack fragmentation cost for a growing company is unowned joins. Okta 2025: 101 apps on average. Flexera: complete visibility at 43 percent. The outage lives between contracts.
How to get a small business cited by ChatGPT: match a fan-out query, answer in 50 words with a number, stay in Bing, name the author, ship valid schema, allow crawlers. Library size is not the KPI.
After three years of the same conversation with executives at every stage, the advice has stabilized. Here's the version I'd give if you bought me a coffee.
Accessible websites rank better. Not because Google rewards virtue — because the same technical practices that make a site accessible make it easier for search engines to understand.
Cloud hosting isn't inherently better than self-hosted — and self-hosted isn't inherently more secure. The right answer depends on variables most cloud comparisons don't bother to address.
