Tech & Future

Tech & Programming

Speak to machines, build things

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Engineering Mindset

How senior engineers actually think: smaller iterations, clearer naming, fewer clever tricks. Boring code that ships beats clever code that breaks.

Debug by forming a hypothesis and testing it, not by random edits.
Choose the simpler design when two solutions are equally correct.
Leave a codebase a little cleaner than you found it on every PR.

Concepts (13)

Idempotency
A property where running the same operation once or many times produces the same final result.
Open
CAP theorem
In a distributed data system that suffers network partitions, you can guarantee either consistency or availability, but not both at the same time.
Open
Caching strategies
Keeping a copy of an expensive-to-fetch result in a faster, closer store so future reads can skip the work, with rules for when to invalidate or refresh it.
Open
ACID vs BASE
Two contrasting consistency philosophies for data systems, ACID guarantees strict, transactional correctness, while BASE accepts temporary inconsistency in exchange for availability and scale.
Open
Eventual consistency
A consistency model in distributed systems where, if no new writes are made, all replicas will eventually converge to the same value, but reads in between can return stale data.
Open
Big O complexity
Mathematical notation from Bachmann and Landau that describes how the runtime or memory of an algorithm grows as the input size grows toward infinity.
Open
Distributed consensus
A class of protocols that lets a group of machines agree on a single value or order of events even when some nodes crash or messages are delayed, dropped, or reordered.
Open
REST vs GraphQL
REST exposes resources at fixed URLs with HTTP verbs, while GraphQL exposes a single endpoint where clients query the exact shape of data they want.
Open
OAuth 2.0 authorisation flows
OAuth 2.0 is a delegated authorisation framework that lets a user grant a third party application limited access to a resource without sharing their password.
Open
JWT basics and common pitfalls
JSON Web Tokens are compact signed claims, encoded as three base64url segments separated by dots, used to assert identity or authorisation across services.
Open
Public-key cryptography
Cryptosystems that use a mathematically linked key pair, a public key for encryption or verification and a private key for decryption or signing.
Open
Rate limiting strategies
Techniques to cap the rate of requests a client or system can make in a given time window, protecting backends from overload and abuse.
Open
Containerisation with Docker
A way to package an application and its dependencies into a portable image that runs in an isolated process called a container.
Open

All Tech & Programming glossary

Back to overview

Variable
A named place to store a value.
Function
A named block of reusable code.
Big-O
How cost grows with input size.
API
Application Programming Interface, a contract for using a service.
Git
Distributed version control system; the standard.
Commit
A snapshot of your code at a moment in time, with a message.
Branch
A separate line of development you can merge later.
Refactor
Improving code structure without changing behaviour.
Idempotency
Operation that yields the same result whether called once or many times.
ACID
Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability, guarantees for reliable database transactions.
Race condition
Bug where outcome depends on unpredictable timing of concurrent operations.