Perceptions of Emerging Technologies – Prashanth Chandrasekar, Stack Overflow

This is texturing TV. Hi everyone, welcome back here to techstrug TV, you know, I'm happy to have on it. Well before I even introduce them, there's only Six Degrees of Separation in the tech world.

And if you're old enough sooner or later, everything gets recycled and so right next guest reminded me before we came on today that I originally met him. com was maybe a year old. He was with another company he's going to tell you about and then we crossed paths then and you know, it comes around the karma wheel goes around around and we're back here again, let me introduce you to Prashant Chandra soccer Chargers seagar Prashant is the CEO of stack Overflow today and Prashant.

Welcome to Tech strong TV. It's good to have you on. Great to be here Alan and good to see you again.

After all these years eight years exactly. So, you know, I I said a little bit about it, but and that kind of gives people a little of your background, but why don't you Share with the audience a little bit about your own Journey. Yeah, I know.

Absolutely, you know, I I started out as a as a technology person study study Computer Engineering and then quickly realized that you know, I was actually was harder than it seemed even though you know it sort of was in the throws of actually writing code. I as a discovered that it was actually more interesting for me to sort of think about companies that were scaling and growing and you know, how do they operate and those sort of things really sort of caught my curiosity but specifically focus on Tech obviously technology is fundamental. So my journey along the way has been to learn all components of how big, you know, great tech companies are run and and sort of how they grow rapidly.

So really went on a journey of learning operations Finance in tech companies and then ultimately being an operator at a large cloud services company. That was fast growing which is Met Alan in 2015. And then I was approached about this role in 2019 for the CEO stack.

And you know, this is just a just a phenomenal organization and a company and community that that we lead around the world. So, you know, we're just I know your audience likely knows about stack Overflow, but just to give them sort of a quick for those of them that don't stack over the world's largest software developer community and platform we serve close to about a hundred million people around the world. We have a very large community of users that have close to 50 million questions and answers that are in the the knowledge base of the public community.

And then on on the SAS side, we all so enable companies to leverage the same platform for knowledge sharing within their organizations, which is something that we call stackable for teams within companies. So those are the sort of the the two parts of our company the community and the public platform and then we have a private stackable for companies to Leverage. Now I used by over 15,000 organizations around the world.

That's fantastic man. What a great story, you know and stack Overflow. It's kind of one of the pillars in the development.

Not only development but devops. Ops security cloud cloud native. It's a pillar of the tech world.

Right? And and you know, that's It the proofs in the pudding by how many users and organizations? Yeah, you have involved there.

So Prashant you guys recently did a an emerging technology sentiment survey. of the community and look with that size Community. You know, you you got a good sampling I would imagine tell us a little bit.

Well, let's start this what I mean the title is the title. I think people can figure out what it is. But what kind of drives you guys to do a survey on this?

Yeah, I think generally speaking, you know Alan we we conduct surveys throughout the year, you know, we are most prominent survey is the stackable flow developer survey that happens once a year and and we typically get responses from 100 million people that we that we have in our community but 100,000 of them every year will very very religiously respond to our surveys and that sort of very very meaningful data set to your point. In addition to that Marquis survey that we conduct every year. We also do several pulse surveys throughout the year on various topics and the one that we typically do about you know, eight or nine of them and most recently the one that we just did around emerging technology is was responded by a few thousand developers and technologists from our community.

And what we were mostly curious about is since the tech world as we were discussing coming into this conversation move so rapidly and it's so exciting to be part of it in every cycle and it just and to the discussion we had it just seems to Building on every wave, right? So you've had the you know, all these sort of waves over the past call it about decade and a half or so the cloud wave and the DeVos wave which you've been part of the security wave and then just you know, ultimately now with with data and machine learning and now that sort of in the news. I think you just felt really appropriate for us to to do this and because just to capture a snapshot in time view of how developers think about these spaces.

So that's generally why we did it the biggest things are moving rapidly and we want to make sure that we reflect the sentiment of developers and technologist who we serve on a daily basis in you know, really reflect the back to our audience who engages with us. Excellent, and I agree 100% So let's jump into it. What?

Was three if you will because usually surveys. You know have three or four sort of eye-catching highlights. Yeah.

Yeah, so I think the biggest thing for us is you know, there are a couple things that we're not necessarily surprising but I think for us if you think about the biggest sort of trend, you know, tectonic shift over the past decade it's been access to Ross storage computer networking. That's obviously Cloud more broadly speaking and that's been obviously a fundamental driver of change because all these sort of building blocks that are now so ubiquitously available to any developer. It doesn't matter what age and where you're located you're able to spin up a cloud instance and get going and get really rapidly moving.

I think that that is again fundamental point. However, the two additional things that came up that were very relevant for us one was open source Technologies, which is which makes a lot of sense because you know open source is really how people are able to scale by truly learning and collaborating with each other in the open internet and that's gonna very foundational to stack over because a lot of the content on stack Overflow is open source. And on top of that of course is The topic of the hour which is all about machine learning and Ai and data, which is obviously the other sort of big big subject.

So those in addition to Cloud I think were the ones that really stood out and I think it's really, you know, there's a lot of unpack on those but generally speaking those at the top two topics. I again I probably don't disagree at all there. Like what?

So what was the sentiment those being the topics? What what did the community think like for instance? Right.

My feeling is the cloud has evolved and matured to the point where we it just is right and I think that's the way of Technology right things eventually become part of the woodwork. They become part of the scenery. We don't even realize it right.

Yeah. I I think cloud is like that now to a certain to a certain extent there's still do I want to use Google or Microsoft or AWS or what have you but yeah, whether or not you're gonna use the cloud the question is am I watching my cloud cost not whether I'm going to use the cloud or not. I think you said something else before though.

You said you know this wave of security. We're seeing that you know, I'm gearing up. I'm gonna be out and RSA conference in a couple weeks.

This year will be doing our devsecops and broadcasting or streaming all weekend broadcast Ali. How did Security show up here. And if so how and kind of what was the sentiment on that?

Yeah, I think to your point. I think it's it's one of those security something that is almost, you know assumed as part of like the woodwork as you're describing right? It's like almost like, you know, it's a it's a non-negotiable, you know, and you you're hearing with your point around deaf SEC Ops, it's very much integrated into how people write code these days Securities is a core part of how you think about it, especially given sort of the endpoints that have now sort of the end.

They're sort of the you know, so you're tapestry you sort of extended so much because of your ability to spin up instances so easily and so I think with that absolutely it didn't show up as an emerging technology because it's an established technology. I think there's obviously plenty of innovation within security and within sort of this the new form factors, for example, something like serverless technology or service Computing which is you know, if you think about traditional, you know, storage computer networking and Analyzation and then serverless is sort of being sort of the kind of the motion, but the rise of serverless computing there's obviously with something like security which is more of a kind of a vertical that basic or horizontal. I should say is now integrated into the new form factor within serverless Computing.

So you have security features in serverless environments as an example. So those are it's just fundamental. Allen is way.

I would say it so it didn't come up in the context of a new emerging technology, but certainly it is very much understood and we conduct by the way a security pulse survey every year because it is one of them know pillars like Cloud it's you know thing it's obvious that you have sort of think about that. I think that what's more oh sorry, go ahead. You're about no.

No, it's gonna say I think in the context of the you know, the guy the truth that I mentioned something like open source. I think it's really been proven of having sort of positive impact on the world, right because there's if you think about it sort of Paving Way to creation of new technologies ultimately then they're in some ways. They sort of are leading indicator to what's likely to happen because open source is like the the purest form in some ways of developers discovering.

Okay. They have a problem. There's an Elegance issue or there's a memory issue and they're going to create something and ultimately, you know, various companies will make proprietary versions of some of these that are optimized for their particular ecosystem of tools and Technologies.

So I think we love open source for that reason is that it really gives us a view of why what's coming in the future and what's what's really really powerful and the AI side. What's what was striking about it? This year was a little bit of an interesting topic because you know, most of folks have been surveyed actually found that they were very very they've sort of ranked it as a very high potential going to be adding a lot of impact for Humanity for for the tech industry generally gently speaking a lot of interest in learning about the technology and Trained on the technology.

So those things were very very positive there was you know, as you know, we're talking about technologists. All Aston. We're all technologists in the context of being skeptical about like, right so there's got to be some level of balance.

So there was also a level of healthy skepticism around, you know, not getting too far ahead of you know, so the hype cycle and really, you know developers into knowledge really want thoughtful practical ways in which this can be leveraged not in a sort of hype oriented way but more and not in a sort of hammer looking for a nail kind of way but more in the way that made sense in the context of their work and their their workflow on a daily basis. So I think that you know, the enthusiasm of the potential and willingness and and eagerness to learn about it balanced by some level of skepticism was about, you know, the immediate, you know, use of what's out there in the context of practical Enterprise applications and so on that was effectively the big learning from us. Is a great but you know, that's interesting.

I for Shanta I'd love to interview you a year from now for your next survey on on this and look back at this video. Yeah about you know what we found there and and see because I think I don't disagree with the findings. I I think the potential of AI is is game changing right?

I think the practicing the Practical applications of it today or in the next couple months. Not so much. Yes, right.

I I think we you know, I mean it it's cool, right you could go on and ask it to write something or ask you to do some code. May or may not be great. But I mean certainly you could see my goodness.

If this thing keeps learning where it goes, I wanted to talk a little bit about another topic you brought up which was data and you know data storage data Ops where we're doing a lot of coverage around that now too, you know data Ops, I mean for a long time we will focus on security. We will focus on applications. We will focused on Cloud and we you know, all of these things somehow recently.

We've rediscovered that hey, it's all about the data stupid right that that data is King and and that's the crown jewels and and we're seeing this. Renewed focus on everything data. Yeah data storage data security data transfer data analysis data Ops.

Yeah. You yeah, it's absolutely like it's foundational and this speaks to like the earlier. Let me sort of take it one sort of Step broader and that I'll bring it back to your point around data.

I think if you counting forces that have been at play over the past decade and we spoke about this this coming into this conversation, you know this they're all sort of building on each other right very significantly. So if you just take the three that we just talk about in our survey open source, you know, 78% of businesses are using open source software, right and 70% developers are working in open source to improve their skills in some context in terms of the cloud that is currently, you know, I think was about 600 billion or so in 2023 based on gartners sort of estimates. It's moving to about a trillion dollars by 2026.

So that's a very large foundational shift in terms of access to compute around the world or just cloud computing more broadly and then a cool part of that if you look at what is comprised of in that in that number specifically there's a lot the fastest growing segments within Cloud our database management business intelligence, and of course other topics like security which we've talked about or just you know, I as and the broader topics But data is a fundamental concept because of the ability to really process a lot of data in very efficient ways in a sort of in a low cost fashion in a utility because sort of model that especially in a world where you've got, you know big llms and machine learning models all so now very it's very sort of practical and how this could accelerate the world and it's very very clear that this is going to be sort of a completely tectonic shift in the industry. So again, we I can tell you a little bit more about You know how stack Overflow we ourselves are super excited about the technology. We're experimenting with all sorts of things with our customers and users at the moment.

But that is really, you know, kind of the broad picture of why in many ways like this is sort of a it's a virtual cycle right? It's going to sort of feed on each other and ultimately data is the gold within organizations that really unlock a lot of insights about your customers and users and and what you can actually you know before even the user and the customer knows what they want you're able to predict it in many ways. And so all those sort of things that need the context around product LED companies in the SAS Universe.

A lot of that has to do it user behavior and what you know, what ultimately the you know the job that needs to be done within within organization. So I think data is in many ways, you know, the goal within companies that they need to sort of ultimately Mind through through all these sort of more factors and technologies that they have access to Agreed agreed here for shots. We're running out of time.

I wanted to make sure for people who want to like dive in a bit here. Yeah and and take a look at the survey results and what because we skimmed. I mean there's only so much you could do and you know this amount of time where can they go get like to take a deeper dive?

Yeah, they can be, you know, we we have a very extensive, you know set of properties one specifically our stack Overflow blog which is called the Overflow. blog you will you will find our latest emerging Technologies survey, which is called stack Overflow nose. That's what that is along with.

Of course, we have our podcast and newsletter that goes out to millions of people on a weekly basis where we showcase a lot of this work so our sack over podcast twice a week as well as our newsletter that goes out to all our users around the world all these places out places that they can they can Leverage. I love it Prashant. It's great read re-engaging with you.

Let's not wait eight years to talk you get come back anytime and we can continue the conversation. Sounds great Alan. Well, I look forward to engaging with you.

Hopefully Matt sooner especially as we approach, you know us our ability to talk publicly about some of the things that we're working on with regards for our own AI ml capabilities. It relates to our stack over for teams SAS capability for customers to use as well. As also what we also have in our thought process around how users can experience this technology to that benefit on stack Overflow.

So we're very excited about what's here. What's to come here in the coming months? I'm gonna hold you through that.

Okay, let's do it. Let's see you there first time trying to talk here on text on TV. Have a great day.

You too. Thank you.