About Stack Quarterly
Stack Quarterly is a quarterly publication for engineers and operators who have to make stack decisions and live with them. Our focus is the AI and agentic side of the developer tooling market: what working teams are actually shipping with, why they chose it, and what they would change.
Mission
We exist to write the kind of piece a senior engineer would want to read on a Sunday afternoon: long, opinionated, written by someone who has actually shipped on the technology in question, and willing to say what they disagree with about it. The agentic-AI market generated an enormous amount of writing in the four years before this publication launched. Most of it falls into one of three categories: marketing-flavored vendor blogs, listicle aggregators that have never run the code, and academic papers whose authors have never had to deliver a feature on a deadline. We thought there was a slot for a fourth thing — the practitioner-publication slot — and we are trying to fill it.
The voice is dry on purpose. The pieces are long on purpose. The slate is small on purpose. We are not trying to dominate your feed; we are trying to be the publication you bookmark and come back to once a quarter.
What we cover
Our beats are the named editorial topics at /topics/:
- Agentic stack and orchestration. Frameworks, patterns, runtime choices. The publication’s spine.
- Protocols and standards. MCP, A2A, OpenAgents, custom JSON-RPC. What teams adopt, when they roll their own, why.
- Observability and evals. What “production-ready” actually means for an agentic system, what logging looks like at scale, where the cardinality bombs live.
- Infrastructure for AI workloads. Vector DBs, inference runtimes, autoscaling, the boring layer that decides whether the demo survives contact with traffic.
- Practitioner essays. Working engineers writing about a specific decision they made.
- Tooling surveys. Recurring landscape pieces written without faked percentages.
Pieces in the archive at /posts/ are filed against these beats and against the secondary topics at the bottom of each piece.
Editorial independence
Stack Quarterly is an independent editorial publication. The publication’s named contributors retain editorial control. We do not accept commissioned pieces from outside parties, we do not write to a vendor brief, and we do not pull pieces in response to pressure from named subjects absent a substantive correction request.
We are funded by a combination of contributor self-funding and a small operating reserve. The publication’s only durable asset is the reader’s trust; everything else is replaceable. The full editorial guidelines — sourcing, conflicts, anonymous sources, corrections, fact-checking — live at /editorial-guidelines/.
Masthead
| Role | Person | Beat |
|---|---|---|
| Senior Practitioner Writer | Reza Mokhtari | Agentic orchestration, MCP, working tooling choices |
| Staff Developer-Essayist | Ginger Wolfe-Suarez | Developer workflow, team adoption, architectural posture |
| Editorial Team | Rotating byline | Landscape surveys, listicles, decision-pieces |
Full bios at /contributors/. Contributor contact follows the convention <firstname>@stackquarterly.com.
History
Stack Quarterly launched in Q1 2026 with a slate of pieces drawn from a winter of practitioner conversations and public-writeup audits. The publication was conceived in mid-2025 on the premise that the AI/agentic press needed a quarterly that respected the practitioner’s time.
The “quarterly” cadence is deliberate. Most developer publications run on a weekly or daily cadence, which produces a lot of thin pieces. The quarterly cadence forces the writers to pick fewer subjects and spend more time on each one. It also lets us be honest about waiting for a story to mature before we cover it.
Funding
Stack Quarterly is reader-supported in spirit and contributor-supported in fact. There is no paywall, no display advertising, no sponsored content, no affiliate revenue. Contributors are paid per-piece on publication, net-15; rates are at /contact/.
If we add a sponsor model in the future — a single, clearly disclosed sponsor at the top of an issue, no editorial input, no per-piece sponsorship — the press page will be updated before we do.
Ethics
The short version of the publication’s ethics is the long version of the editorial guidelines. The short-short version:
- We do not run advertorial.
- We do not write a piece whose conclusion was decided before the reporting.
- We do not pull pieces in response to legal threats absent a substantive case.
- We do pull pieces when we are wrong.
- We correct in place with a dated note. The corrections log is at /corrections/.
Get involved
| If you… | Go here |
|---|---|
| Want to pitch a piece | /contact/ |
| Have a tip | tips@stackquarterly.com |
| Spotted an error | corrections@stackquarterly.com |
| Want to use the brand | /press/ |
| Want the FAQ | /faq/ |
| Want to subscribe | /newsletter/ |
| Want the raw feed | RSS · JSON Feed |
A note on the writing
The publication is written for the working engineer. The voice is dry. The pieces are long. The code samples are expected to run. The numbers we publish are the numbers we have. The pieces we do not have the standing to write, we do not write.
If you are reading this page for the first time, the archive at /posts/ is the right place to start.