The REALIST Stack - by Venkatesh Rao - Contraptions

I want to introduce a lighthouse concept that I’ve been noodling on for several years now, which I finally turned into an acronym that I can easily reference: the REALIST stack. A lot of my writing in recent years has been subconsciously shaped by the idea of this stack in the back of my head. A lot of my consulting work since 2016 or so has also been with companies that work on this stack, one way or another. It’s a stack that’s been maturing all around us for a few years, driven by the twin forces of software eating the world, and the global energy transition. The idea of thinking of engineering as happening on multi-layered technology “stacks” came from software, but the REALIST stack applies to all engineering. And increasingly, all engineering should happen on the REALIST stack to the extent possible. If you can build something on the REALIST stack, you probably shouldn’t build it any other way. Rather serendipitously for a backronym, the letter order roughly follows the actual or

I want to introduce a lighthouse concept that I’ve been noodling on for several years now, which I finally turned into an acronym that I can easily reference: the REALIST stack. A lot of my writing in recent years has been subconsciously shaped by the idea of this stack in the back of my head. A lot of my consulting work since 2016 or so has also been with companies that work on this stack, one way or another. It’s a stack that’s been maturing all around us for a few years, driven by the twin forces of software eating the world, and the global energy transition. The idea of thinking of enginee