About
Who writes this, what the rule is, and what a membership actually buys.
STACK is a publication of first-hand engineering essays. One person builds the systems, breaks them, measures what happened, and writes it down. No news round-ups, no takes on other people’s launches, no filler.
The rule is on the footer of every page: everything here was run, paid for, and measured. In practice that means:
- If a number appears, it came from a log, a benchmark, a receipt, or a file — and the piece says where.
- If something failed, the failure is the story. The GIMP experiment, the outage, the storefront that did not need a platform: those are published as failures, with the numbers that show it.
- If a piece cannot be grounded, it does not go out. Drafts stay in the drawer.
What this is
The subjects come from one long project: a personal AI memory engine, the machines it runs on, a print-on-demand store, and the tooling around all of it. Essays are written when a build finishes, an incident closes, or a measurement contradicts the assumption. They are deliberately not scheduled content.
What a membership is
The archive has free pieces and members’ pieces. A membership is $8 a month or $80 a year, and it buys:
- every members’ piece, in full, including the receipts and the numbers behind it;
- the full archive as it grows, including the pieces that do not work out;
- no advertising, no tracking scripts, no sponsors — nothing on the page that is not ours.
Members’ pieces are the ones that cost real money or real risk to write: incident post-mortems, receipts-led teardowns, failure write-ups with vendor names. Free pieces are the ones that are useful to anyone building something similar.
How it is made
The site is plain HTML and CSS, built from Markdown files kept in git, served by a small Node process. There is no JavaScript on any page, no third-party font or analytics request, and no cookie other than the session cookie that keeps you signed in. Payments go through Stripe’s hosted Checkout; card details never touch this server.
Corrections
A published piece can be corrected, but not silently. Material corrections are appended to the piece with the date and what changed. The first version is in the git history, and the receipts are in the vault.
Contact
Questions, corrections, data requests, refunds: reply to any receipt you have from Stripe, or use the support address shown there. That reaches the operator directly; there is no ticket queue.
Written and operated by Clifton Morris. The site, the engine and the store are all his work; this page is the only place that says so in the third person.
Last updated 18 October 2026.