Stack: May

I've been carrying this month's Stack around for two weeks, reading it from cover to cover and wondering what on earth I'm going to write about it. This month's delivery is Offscreen, "a print magazine about the people behind bits and pixels". Broadly speaking, it looks at people who have founded or are running technology businesses, and that covers people from the CEO of moo.com, which prints business cards, to the founder of Kickboard, a program to help schools track students' progress. The contents are a series of interviews, some pages long and some only a few paragraphs long, and this issue profiles at least 25 people.

I've been struggling with what to say about it because I found myself a bit ambivalent about Offscreen. It's fascinating – reading it from cover to cover wasn't a chore by any means – but it also feels so aspirational that I kept thinking it was trying to sell me something. This is despite the fact that it has no traditional adverts! (Companies can sponsor Offscreen, and if they do they get a page in the sponsors section of the magazine. All the sponsor pages are black with white text so it's very clear that they're separate from the rest of the magazine and I really enjoyed this clear distinction of content and advertising.) There's obviously a lot of success in the interviews, but there's a lot of emphasis on happiness and personal fulfilment too. There's a repeating narrative about founding and running a successful business that also gives something back to the world or changes it for the better in some way and helps you grow as a person. As well as photographs of their subjects at work, the longer articles also include photographs of their subjects relaxing: gardening, cycling through the streets of Portland, sharing a coffee with laughing co-workers.

Aspiring to start a personally-fulfilling business is a great thing, but I doubt it's as easy as these profiles make it sound. Offscreen is not a how-to guide for launching a business or developing a new technology, but if you want to do those things you'll find a lot of inspiration in its pages – stories of people who did those things and succeeded. If you don't, you might find its evangelical passion a bit offputting. It's an interesting magazine, but I found myself wondering who its audience is, who reads it regularly. Two weeks later I'd still love to know.

Would I buy it again? I don't think so, but I'm not really sure. It's another one that I might buy for somebody else – maybe if any of my programmer friends ever launch their own start-up I'll send them a copy!