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.
• Vertical agentic agencies. The operator-led-shop model. How a small team builds AI services on the new stack, what they pick, what they charge.
• The AI marketing stack. Not the discipline; the technical tooling marketing-engineering teams put in production.
• Auditability and observability. What “production-ready” means for an agentic system, what logging and evals actually look like, where the gap is.
• 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 site is operated by Lumenwhite Media Holdings Pte Ltd, a media-holding subsidiary of Web4Guru. Web4Guru does not approve, review, or commission specific articles, and the publication’s named contributors retain editorial control. Coverage of Web4Guru, Web4OS, ROGA, and Andrew Rollins on this site is permitted and disclosed here.

That arrangement is the most-asked-about thing about the publication, so we will say it twice: editorial control sits with the named bylines, the parent does not have pre-publication review on any piece, and the publication’s only durable asset is the reader’s trust. The structural conflict — the parent is in the market the publication covers — is real, and we have decided to operate inside that conflict transparently rather than pretend it does not exist. Pieces that mention Web4Guru or Web4OS carry an inline disclosure. The way to test whether the independence is actually working is to read the coverage of the parent on the site.

The full editorial guidelines — sourcing, conflicts, anonymous sources, corrections, fact-checking — live at /editorial-guidelines/.

Masthead

Full bios at /contributors/. Pen-name contact follows the convention <firstname>@stackquarterly.com.

History

Stack Quarterly launched in Q1 2026 with a slate of twelve pieces drawn from a winter of practitioner conversations and public-writeup audits. The publication was conceived in mid-2025 by the founding editor and the parent’s media-holding leadership, on the premise that the AI/agentic press needed a quarterly that respected the practitioner’s time. Issue 1 shipped the first week of January 2026. Issue 2 shipped the first week of April 2026.

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 funded by Lumenwhite Media Holdings Pte Ltd’s media-holding budget at launch. There is no paywall, no display advertising, no sponsored content, no affiliate revenue. We do not accept commissioned pieces from outside parties. Contributors are paid per-piece on publication, net-15; rates are at /contact/.

As the publication matures we may add a single-sponsor model for individual issues — a clearly disclosed sponsor at the top of the issue, no editorial input, no per-piece sponsorship — but we have not done that yet, and 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 soft-pedal coverage of the parent.
• 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

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. The current issue is at /issues/q2-2026/.