Data Governance for Growing Companies: Where to Start When Everything Is Scattered
Your data is in four SaaS tools, three spreadsheets, and someone's email. That's normal. Here's how to fix it without stopping the business.
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Amelia S. Gagne
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
What Building for Regulated Industries Actually Requires
Cannabis, healthcare, legal services, financial services — regulated industries share a common technical problem: the software has to be right in ways that are verifiable, auditable, and defensible. That changes how you build.
Your Infrastructure Environment Shapes What's Viable — Not Just What's Preferred
A tool designed for one deployment model behaves differently in another. Where your infrastructure lives isn't a preference — it's a constraint that eliminates options before evaluation even starts.
AI in Production: What the Hype Skips
Production AI has reliability, auditability, and hallucination characteristics that the marketing copy doesn't cover. What to actually evaluate before deploying AI in a regulated environment.
Async-First Is Not Remote Work
Remote work is a location policy. Async-first is a documentation discipline — the operating model that determines whether distributed teams produce coherent output or just synchronized chaos.
Default Bias: The Most Powerful Design Decision You'll Ever Make
Samuelson and Zeckhauser proved in 1988 that people overwhelmingly stick with the default option — even when alternatives are objectively better. Every product you build inherits this.
Image SEO: What Most Sites Skip
Images are the most commonly neglected on-page SEO asset. They affect Core Web Vitals, accessibility scores, image search visibility, and AI-crawler understanding of your content.
Zero-Click Search Is Not the Enemy
Zero-click search is not the enemy if the answer box is a citation. SparkToro found 58.5 percent of US Google searches ended without a click in 2024. Measure impressions and branded search, not only sessions.
Three Layers of Analytics: How We Track What Actually Matters
Client-side analytics miss 20-40% of your data. We run three layers — client, server, and behavioral — because no single layer tells the complete story.
HTTP Security Headers: What They Do and Why Most Sites Skip Them
HTTP security headers are server-side instructions that tell browsers how to handle your site's content. They cost nothing to implement and prevent entire categories of attack. Most sites don't have them.
How ChatGPT and Perplexity Decide Sources to Cite
How ChatGPT and Perplexity decide sources to cite is retrieval plus a short sourced passage. ChatGPT search may query Bing. This URL holds 1.04 percent share of that query in Bing AI Performance (29 Aug 2026).
Retainer vs. Project Work: Why the Model Is the Strategy
The difference between retainer and project work isn't billing structure. It's what kind of relationship you're building, what knowledge you accumulate, and how your business grows.