Stack Overflow CEO reveals major trends dominating development

Cloud has long ruled the roost, but developers are fickle

Seventy per cent of developers learn a new technology every year, emphasising the scale and speed of tech evolution. And there’s one particular technology that has dominated developer Q&A website Stack Overflow in recent years.

Stack Overflow CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar - himself a developer who used the site professionally before taking the leadership role in 2019 - sums up the site's top three topics as "cloud consumption, ML [machine learning] and blockchain."

Cloud computing's popularity shouldn't be a surprise: every modern company uses cloud in some fashion. Questions and answers about the topic posted to Stack Overflow have climbed 50% every year for the past 10 years, covering everything from public cloud data to containers.

But no king rules forever. Cloud isn't going anywhere, but it isn't the growth area it once was; Chandrasekar points out that familiarity with tools like Docker and concepts like DevOps CI/CD are naturally having an impact on the need to raise questions, particularly in some markets.

"The UK is particularly at the top of the heap when it comes to adoption of DevOps, CI/CD tooling, automated testing and things like that. We're talking 78% of all folks that we've interviewed said that, in the UK. In the US it's closer to the low 70s, and the rest of the world that's sort of in the 60s."

But even as developer interest in cloud levels off, new tech rises to replace it. The increase in questions about machine learning is now at a similar level to those about cloud - growing 50% year-on-year - and blockchain is rising even faster, at about an 80% increase every year over the past decade.

Feelings around blockchain and how it can be used in business are "very polarised," Chandrasekar admits, calling it a "religious topic," but the data doesn't lie: interest is climbing quickly.

"Thirty percent of the folks that responded to us said that they were building a blockchain app within their companies, which is quite interesting. And when we looked at who those companies were, 70% of the 30% were tech companies specifically - so it's certainly entered the mainstream, it's no longer sort of a hobby."

The Stack Overflow CEO thinks blockchain has been unfairly tarred with the same brush as other Web3 concepts, like cryptocurrency - the bubble for which undeniably burst in 2022 - and the metaverse.

"I think there's a difference between blockchain and crypto and Web3 and all the marketing jargon that goes with these phases as people go through the technology S-curve; but it's [still] finding the right problem to solve. Clearly there's power in it; something like blockchain is powerful as a concept, so I think it's well recognised as something that could be useful. Now the question is, what are the applications that could be the most powerful and high impact ones?"

Blockchain is gathering momentum, but is it still a solution in search of a problem?