What’s this?
This newsletter helps you become a well-rounded engineer.
We send two types of emails:
Online Editions
Theme: Becoming a better engineer at work
Topics: Engineering + Productivity.
Vibe: Educational — strict business.
Offline Editions
Theme: Engineering a great life AFK
Topics: Productivity + Purpose.
Vibe: Casual yet actionable.
If you just want one, you can opt out of the other here: https://newsletter.fullstack.zip/account
2026 Content Calendar
The fullstack concept is pretty broad, so we break our content focus into themes, each of which has some recommended reading.
Don’t worry — there’s no quiz.
Q1: ARCHITECTURE
Creating big systems
Recommended reading
Roman builders: a study in architectural process (Taylor)
Modern architecture since 1900 (Curtis)
Just Enough Software Architecture (Fairbanks)
Head First Software Architecture (Gandhi)
Q2: DATA STRUCTURES & ALGORITHMS
zooming into the fundamentals, so that we can understand how to use them
Recommended reading
Introduction to Algorithms (Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest, Stein)
Algorithms (Sedgewick, Wayne)
Data Structures and Algorithms in Java (Goodrich, Tamassia, Goldwasser)
The Algorithm Design Manual (Skiena)
Q3: CONFIGURATION
Making a system YOURs. Now that we know the rules of DSA, we know how to break them
Recommended reading
How to Live: 27 conflicting answers and one weird conclusion (Sivers)
Infrastructure as Code (Kief Morris)
Terraform: Up & Running (Brikman)
Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World (Epstein)
Q4: PERFORMANCE OPTIMIZATION
Making fast feel inevitable: profiling, constraints, and the art of choosing what not to optimize
Recommended reading
Systems Performance (Gregg)
The Art of Computer Systems Performance Analysis (Jain)
High Performance Browser Networking (Grigorik)
High Performance JavaScript (Zakas)
Why Fullstack Engineering?
We’re engineers who work across the stack (frontend, backend, ops) to create great software.
We’re also humans who strive for wealth, purpose, and health.
There is an art to modulating between layers of the stack — both inside and outside of the IDE.
This newsletter is for those who are committed to architecting a full life, rather than maxing out one dimension of it.
Who r u?
We’re the small, bootstrapped team behind Compass — a productivity app for software engineers. We’re always searching for the best ways to ship fast while maintaining our sanity. We figured we might as well share our notes as we go.
To learn more about us and what we believe in, check out our public handbook.
