Good post. Don't forget to pay your full-stack engineer with a full-stack money. Don't be cheap on them mkay?

On the other hand, I'd like to have a full-stack CEO as well. Not just someone who can only say "make it work", "make it faster", "make me some money".

There are non-full-stack programmers? That's a scary thought. I have trouble imagining what sort of mind could be able to write code, but only one kind of code.

The author achieved a big speed increase with a faster disk, more RAM, adding indexes, and rewriting slow queries. The relevant skillset is "knowing a thing or two about databases", not "full-stack programmer".

Am I wrong in thinking that most technical founders are full stack developers?

If something is taking way too long, often times it shouldn't be made faster, it should be done differently. For example, it takes me 4 hours to get to work, just making the car faster isn't going to help. Maybe the solution is to take a plane, get a different job,work from home, or move closer to where you want to be.

Ain't nothing faster than 0. I've done games for 20 years. The best optimizations are figuring out how to avoid running the code in the first place. This is where full-stack programmers come in.

There seems to be a battle here between full-stackers and specialists, but if you think of a full-stacker as "an extremely experienced generalist", then I think there are plenty of "extremely experienced specialists" who fit that description too. That is to say, an extremely experienced "database optimizer" is going to know how the presentation layer hits the database and how the database hits the disc, and I expect they would know many different database technologies.

If everyone could just say "I'm a full-stack" or "I'm a generalist" it'd save me a lot of reading. Thanks. :-)