Future Stack Investing: Latest Updates and Analysis

Investing in the Stack Exchange Network and the future of Stack Overflow

2024 was an exciting year at Stack Overflow. From the launch of new products and capabilities that came directly from integrations with global partnerships to outlining our vision for Knowledge-as-a-service and the changing state of internet models. Hard to believe, but in many ways we have so much more to share in 2025.

As I closed out my last quarterly enhancement, I mentioned, “At Stack Overflow, we’re committed to our community, whether that be our public platform individuals, our individuals, partners, and Stackers, but we also deeply believe in building a future where our larger knowledge communities can thrive in the era of AI. An essential part of that mission is preserving the trust that our community has placed in us for 16 years, and that means continuing to invest back into our knowledge ecosystem.”.

“Investing” in Community is something we discussed a number of times over the past several years as we began our efforts to evaluate how Stack Overflow will evolve in the GenAI era. For some of you, I’m sure the question was raised: “Well, how exactly are you investing in the community?” I’m glad you asked.

Within the digital walls of Stack Overflow, we frequently say “Keep Community at Our Center.” And we mean that. This manifests itself in a number of ways, and one of those is our commitment to the high-quality, accurate library of knowledge built and maintained by the Stack Exchange Communities over the past sixteen years. For Stack Overflow and the larger Stack Exchange network to continue to grow and thrive, we must invest in ways to make it easier for new users to be able to contribute high-quality content. We also need to invite contributors—new ones and long-time, experienced ones—to contribute in new forms beyond just Q&A.

Over the course of the next year, we’ll be focused on ensuring our sites remain a go-to destination for our consumers, including by modernizing the existing assets we have in place and also by introducing new capabilities and aspects that promote contribution from all types of consumers. There is already a lot of experimentation at work on our team, and although we’ve tried to show previews where we can, we want to peel back the curtain and show you more.

The efforts we make and the new elements or products we unveil mean nothing if we aren’t involving community members—the true experts on how the product is used and the challenges it has. We need more community voices at the table, so we’re actively exploring ways to bring in more community perspectives and participation. In order to be an inclusive destination for everyone who wants to participate and consume content, we need a wide range of participants in our research and testing efforts. One of the ways to invite these new perspectives will be our first public AMA.

VP of Community Philippe Beaudette, Chief Product & Technology Officer Jody Bailey, and I will share our vision for new content types and how they will include the quality controls that have made Stack Overflow the trusted resource it is. We’ll also explore other opportunities for community members to edit, rate, and build new features collaboratively.

I hope you’ll join us live on Wednesday, February 26th at 3 pm ET via our YouTube channel (here) to hear our vision. We’ll answer as many questions as we can during the time we have together.

Svelte 5 And The Future Of Frameworks: A Chat With Rich Harris.

After months of anticipation, debate, and even......

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The What If Machine: Bringing the “Iffy” Future of CSS into the Present

Geoff’s post about the CSS Working Group’s decision to work on inline conditionals inspired some drama in the comments section. Some developers are excited, but it angers others, who fear it will make the future of CSS, well, if-fy. Is this a slippery slope into a hellscape overrun with rogue developers who abuse CSS by implementing excessive logic in what was meant to be a styling language? Nah. Even if some jerk did that, no mainstream blog would ever publish the ramblings of that hypothetical nutcase who goes around putting crazy logic into CSS for the sake of it. Therefore, we know the future of CSS is safe.

You say the whole world’s ending — honey, it already did.

My thesis for today’s article offers further reassurance that inline conditionals are probably not the harbinger of the end of civilization: I reckon we can achieve the same functionality right now with style queries, which are gaining pretty good browser support.

If I’m right, Lea’s proposal is more like syntactic sugar which would sometimes be convenient and allow cleaner markup. It’s amusing that any panic-mongering about inline conditionals ruining CSS might be equivalent to catastrophizing adding a ternary operator for a language that already supports if statements.

Indeed, Lea says of her proposed syntax, “Just like ternaries in JS, it may also be more ergonomic for cases where only a small part of the value varies.” She also mentions that CSS has always been conditional. Not that conditionality was ever verboten in CSS, but CSS isn’t always very good at it.

Sold! I want a conditional oompa loompa now!

Me too. And many other people, as proven by Lea’s curated list of amazingly complex hacks that people have discovered for simulating inline conditionals with current CSS. Some of these hacks are complicated enough that I’m still unsure if I understand them, but they certainly have cool names. Lea concludes: “If you’re aware of any other techniques, let me know so I can add them.”.

Hmm… surely I was missing something regarding the problems these hacks solve. I noted that Lea has a doctorate whereas I’m an idiot. So I scrolled back up and reread, but I couldn’t stop thinking: Are these people doing all this work to avoid putting an extra div around their widgets and using style queries?

It’s fair if people want to avoid superfluous elements in the DOM, but Lea’s list of hacks displays that the alternatives are super complex, so it’s worth a shot to see how far style queries with wrapper divs can take us.

Lea’s motivating examples revolve around setting a “variant” property on a callout, noting we can almost achieve what she wants with style queries, but this hypothetical syntax is sadly invalid:

.callout { @container (style(--variant: success)) { border-color: var(--color-success-30); background-color: var(--color-success-95); &::before { content: var(--icon-success); color: var(--color-success-05); } } }.

She wants to set styles on both the container itself and its descendants based on --variant . Now, in this specific example, I could get away with hacking the ::after pseudo-element with z-index to give the illusion that it’s the container. Then I could style the borders and background of that. Unfortunately, this solution is as fragile as my ego, and in this other motivating example, Lea wants to set flex-flow of the container based on the variant. In that situation, my pseudo-element solution is not good enough.

Remember, the acceptance of Lea’s proposal into the CSS spec came as her birthday gift from the universe, so it’s not fair to try to replace her gift with one of those cheap fake containers I bought on Temu. She deserves an authentic container.

One of the comments on Lea’s proposal mentions type grinding but calls it “a very (I repeat, very) convoluted but working” approach to solving the problem that inline conditionals are intended to solve. That’s not quite fair. Type grinding took me a bit to get my head around, but I think it is more approachable with fewer drawbacks than other hacks. Still, when you look at the samples, this kind of code in production would get annoying. Therefore, let’s bite the bullet and try to build an alternate version of Lea’s flexbox variant sample. My version doesn’t use type grinding or any hack, but “plain old” (not so old) style queries together with wrapper divs, to work around the problem that we can’t use style queries to style the container itself.

Comparing the code from Lea’s sample and my version can help us understand the differences in complexity.

And here are the two versions of the markup:

So, simpler CSS and slightly more markup. Maybe we are onto something.

What I like about style queries is that Lea’s proposal uses the style() function, so if and when her proposal makes it into browsers then migrating style queries to inline conditionals and removing the wrappers seems doable. This wouldn’t be a 2025 article if I didn’t mention that migrating this kind of code could be a viable use case for AI. And by the time we get inline conditionals, maybe AI won’t suck.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Have you ever tried to adopt some whizz-bang JavaScript framework that looks elegant in the “to-do list” sample? If so, you will know that solutions that appear compelling in simplistic examples can challenge your will to live in a realistic example. So, let’s see how using style queries in the above manner works out in a more realistic example.

Combine my above sample with this MDN example of HTML5 Validation and Seth Jeffery’s cool demo of morphing pure CSS icons, then feed it all into the “What If” Machine to get the demo below.

All the changes you see to the callout if you make the form valid are based on one custom property. This property is never directly used in CSS property values for the callout but controls the style queries that set the callout’s border color, icon, background color, and content. We set the --variant property at the .callout-wrapper level. I am setting it using CSS, like this:

@property --variant { syntax: "error | success"; initial-value: error; inherits: true; } body:has(:invalid) .callout-wrapper { --variant: error; } body:not(:has(:invalid)) .callout-wrapper { --variant: success; }.

However, the variable could be set by JavaScript or an inline style in the HTML, like Lea’s samples. Form validation is just my way of making the demo more interactive to show that the callout can change dynamically based on --variant .

It’s off-brand for me to write an article advocating against hacks that bend CSS to our will, and I’m all for “tricking” the language into doing what we want. But using wrappers with style queries might be the simplest thing that works till we get support for inline conditionals. If we want to feel more like we are living in the future, we could use the above approach as a basis for a polyfill for inline conditionals, or some preprocessor magic using something like a Parcel plugin or a PostCSS plugin — but my trigger finger will always itch for the Delete key on such compromises. Lea acknowledges, “If you can do something with style queries, by all means, use style queries — they are almost certainly a advanced solution.”.

I have convinced myself with the experiments in this article that style queries remain a cromulent option even in Lea’s motivating examples — but I still look forward to inline conditionals. In the meantime, at least style queries are easy to understand compared to the other known workarounds. Ironically, I agree with the comments questioning the need for the inline conditionals feature, not because it will ruin CSS but because I believe we can already achieve Lea’s examples with current modern CSS and without hacks. So, we may not need inline conditionals, but they could allow us to write more readable, succinct code. Let me know in the comment section if you can think of examples where we would hit a brick wall of complexity using style queries instead of inline conditionals.

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Svelte 5 And The Future Of Frameworks: A Chat With Rich Harris

Svelte 5 And The Future Of Frameworks: A Chat With Rich Harris.

After months of anticipation, debate, and even a bit of apprehension, Svelte 5 arrived earlier this year. Frederick O’Brien caught up with its creator, Rich Harris, to talk about the path that brought him and his team here and what lies ahead. After months of anticipation, debate, and even a bit of apprehension, Svelte 5 arrived earlier this year. Frederick O’Brien caught up with its creator, Rich Harris, to talk about the path that brought him and his team here and what lies ahead.

Svelte occupies a curious space within the web development world. It’s been around in one form or another for eight years now, and despite being used by the likes of Apple, Spotify, IKEA, and the New York Times, it still feels like something of an upstart, maybe even a black sheep. As creator Rich Harris lately put it,.

“If React is Taylor Swift, we’re more of a Phoebe Bridges. She’s critically acclaimed, and you’ve heard of her, but you probably can’t name that many of her songs.”.

This may be why the release of Svelte 5 in October this year felt like such a big deal. It tries to square the circle of convention and innovation. Can it remain one of the best-loved frameworks on the web while shaking off suspicions that it can’t quite rub shoulders with React, Vue, and others when it comes to scalability? Whisper it, but they might just have pulled it off. The post-launch reaction has been largely glowing, with weekly npm downloads doubling compared to six months ago.

Still, I’m not in the predictions game. The coming months and years will be the ultimate measure of Svelte 5. And why speculate on the most pressing questions when I can just ask Rich Harris myself? He kindly took some time to chat with me about Svelte and the future of web development.

Svelte 5 is a ground-up rewrite. I don’t want to get into the weeds here — key changes are covered nicely in the migration guide — but suffice it to say the big one where day-to-day individuals are concerned is runes. At times, magic feeling $ has given way to the more explicit $state , $derived , and $effect .

A lot of the talk around Svelte 5 included the sentiment that it marks the ‘maturation’ of the framework. To Harris and the Svelte team, it feels like a culmination, with lessons learned combined with aspirations to form something fresh yet familiar.

“This does sort of feel like a new chapter. I’m trying to build something that you don’t feel like you need to get a degree in it before you can be productive in it. And that seems to have been carried through with Svelte 5.”.

Although raw usage numbers aren’t everything, seeing the uptick in installations has been a welcome signal for Harris and the Svelte team.

“For us, success is definitely not based around adoption, though seeing the number go up and to the right gives us reassurance that we’re doing the right thing and we’re on the right track. Even if it’s not the goal, it is a useful indication. But success is really people building their apps with this framework and building higher quality, more resilient, more accessible apps.”.

The tenets of a Svelte philosophy outlined by Harris earlier this year reinforce the point:

The web matters. Optimise for vibes. Don’t optimise for adoption. HTML, The Mother Language. Embrace progress. Numbers lie. Magical, not magic. Dream big. No one cares. Design by consensus.

Rich Harris – North Star, JSNation US 2024.

Frameworks are a means to that end, and Harris sees plenty of work to be done there.

Every milestone is a cause for celebration. It’s also a natural pause in which to ask, “Now what?” For the Svelte team, the sights seem firmly set on shoring up the quality of the web.

“A conclusion that we reached over the course of a recent discussion is that most software in the world is kind of terrible. Things are not good. Half the stuff on my phone just doesn’t work. It fails at basic tasks. And the same is true for a lot of websites. The number of times I’ve had to open DevTools to remove the disabled attribute from a button so that I can submit a form, or been unclear on whether a payment went through or not.”.

This certainly meshes with my experience and, doubtless, countless others. Between enshittification, manipulative algorithms, and the seemingly endless influx of AI-generated slop, it’s hard to shake the feeling that the web is becoming increasingly decadent and depraved.

“So many pieces of software that we use are just terrible. They’re just bad software. And it’s not because software engineers are idiots. Our main priority as toolmakers should be to enable people to build software that isn’t broken. As a baseline, people should be able to build software that works.”.

This sense of responsibility for the creation and maintenance of good software speaks to the Svelte team’s holistic outlook and also looks to influence priorities going forward.

Part of Svelte 5 feels like a new chapter in the sense of fresh foundations. Anyone who’s worked in software development or web design will tell you how much of a headache ground-up rewrites are. Rebuilding the foundations is something to celebrate when you pull it off, but it also begs the question: What are the foundations for?

Harris has his eyes on the wider ecosystem around frameworks.

“I don’t think there’s a lot more to do to solve the problem of taking some changing application state and turning it into DOM, but I think there’s a huge amount to be done around the ancillary problems. How do we load the data that we put in those components? Where does that data live? How do we deploy our applications?”.

In the short to medium term, this will likely translate into some love for SvelteKit, the web application framework built around Svelte. The framework might start having opinions about authentication and databases, an official component library perhaps, and dev tools in the spirit of the Astro dev toolbar. And all these could be precursors to even bigger explorations.

“I want there to be a Rails or a Laravel for JavaScript. In fact, I want there to be multiple such things. And I think that at least part of Svelte’s long-term goal is to be part of that. There are too many things that you need to learn in order to build a full stack application today using JavaScript.”.

Although Svelte has been ticking along happily for years, the release of version 5 has felt like a new lease of life for the ecosystem around it. Every day brings new and exciting projects to the front page of the /r/sveltejs subreddit, while this year’s Advent of Svelte has kept up a sense of momentum following the stable release.

Below are just a handful of the Svelte-based projects that have caught my eye:

Despite the turbulence and inescapable sense of existential dread surrounding much tech, this feels like an exciting time for web development. The conditions are ripe for lovely new things to emerge.

And as for Svelte 5 itself, what does Rich Harris say to those who might be on the fence?

“I would say you have nothing to lose but an afternoon if you try it. We have a tutorial that will take you from knowing nothing about Svelte or even existing frameworks. You can go from that to being able to build applications using Svelte in three or four hours. If you just want to learn Svelte basics, then that’s an hour. Try it.”.

Things I've worked on/completed since my last post….

I have been working on local storage (the To-do project).

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