A curated collection of definitions, use cases, and facts for important software engineering concepts.
Product, typically software, that is no longer supported or marketed by its creator. It may still be available but is often in a legal grey area regarding copyright.
A metric measuring the proportion of correct predictions (both true positives and true negatives) among the total number of cases examined.
Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability. A set of properties of database transactions intended to guarantee data validity despite errors, power failures, and other mishaps.
A software development methodology where AI agents are used to autonomously or semi-autonomously write, test, and deploy code, often under human supervision.
An API management tool that sits between a client and a collection of backend services. It acts as a reverse proxy to accept all application programming interface (API) calls, aggregate the various services required to fulfill them, and return the appropriate result.
Short for 'asynchronous', it refers to a programming pattern where operations can occur independently of the main program flow. In JavaScript, the `async` keyword declares a function that implicitly returns a Promise.
Area Under (the ROC) Curve. A single scalar value that aggregates the performance of a classifier across all possible classification thresholds.
A row-based data serialization system that relies on schemas. It is best suited for write-heavy operations and data serialization where schema evolution is expected.
An operator used inside an `async` function to pause execution until a Promise is resolved or rejected. It makes asynchronous code look and behave like synchronous code.
A self-balancing tree data structure that maintains sorted data and allows searches, sequential access, insertions, and deletions in logarithmic time.
The process of processing data that corresponds to a time period that has already passed. It is often used when a new metric is defined or a bug is fixed.
The practice of comparing business processes and performance metrics to industry bests and best practices from other companies.
The property of a model that the variance of the parameter estimated across samples can be reduced by increasing the bias in the estimated parameters. The goal is to find a balance that minimizes total error.
A mathematical notation that describes the limiting behavior of a function when the argument tends towards a particular value or infinity. In CS, it's used to classify algorithms according to how their run time or space requirements grow as the input size grows.
A denial-of-service attack targeting XML parsers where recursive XML entity declarations multiply exponentially, causing a tiny XML document of less than one kilobyte to expand into gigabytes in memory, exhausting RAM and freezing the host server.
A search algorithm that finds the position of a target value within a sorted array. It compares the target value to the middle element of the array.
A space-efficient probabilistic data structure that is used to test whether an element is a member of a set. False positive matches are possible, but false negatives are not.
Sections of code or text that are repeated in multiple places with little or no variation. In programming, it refers to standard code required to achieve a task properly.
A join strategy in distributed systems where the smaller table is sent (broadcasted) to all worker nodes, avoiding a shuffle of the larger table.
An anomaly where a program, while writing data to a buffer, overruns the buffer's boundary and overwrites adjacent memory locations, leading to erratic program behavior, memory corruption, system crashes, or arbitrary code execution.
The process of storing copies of files in a temporary storage location, or cache, so that they can be accessed more quickly.
A function passed as an argument to another function, which is then invoked inside the outer function to complete some kind of routine or action.
A situation where callbacks are nested within other callbacks several levels deep, making the code difficult to read, understand, and maintain. Also known as the 'Pyramid of Doom'.
States that it is impossible for a distributed data store to simultaneously provide more than two out of the following three guarantees: Consistency, Availability, and Partition tolerance.
Change Data Capture. A set of software design patterns used to determine and track the data that has changed so that action can be taken using the changed data.
Content Delivery Network. A geographically distributed network of proxy servers and their data centers. The goal is to provide high availability and performance by distributing the service spatially relative to end-users.
Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment/Delivery. A set of practices that automate the processes of software development, testing, and deployment.
A feature where an inner function has access to the outer (enclosing) function's variables—a scope chain. The closure has three scope chains: it has access to its own scope, the outer function's variables, and the global variables.
A database management system that stores data tables by column rather than by row. This is optimized for analytical queries (OLAP).
A programming language where the source code is translated into machine code by a compiler before execution, rather than being interpreted line-by-line at runtime.
The practice of creating systems and processes to ensure that an organization adheres to laws, regulations, and industry standards.
Computing Technology Industry Association. A non-profit trade association that issues professional certifications for the information technology (IT) industry.
Techniques used in operating systems and programming to manage the simultaneous execution of multiple processes or threads, ensuring data integrity and coordination.
A table used to describe the performance of a classification model. It shows true positives, true negatives, false positives, and false negatives.
Algorithms used to achieve agreement on a single data value among distributed processes or systems. Paxos and Raft are the most famous examples.
A distributed hashing scheme that operates independently of the number of servers or objects in a distributed hash table by assigning them a position on an abstract circle, or hash ring.
A security exploit where an attacker operating within a containerized environment breaks out of operating-system-level virtualization boundaries (Linux namespaces, cgroups, and capabilities) to execute unauthorized commands directly on the host operating system.
A form of virtualization where applications run in isolated user spaces called containers, using the same shared operating system (OS).
A resource-management optimization strategy where multiple callers share a single read-only copy of data in memory or storage. A duplicate private copy is only allocated and written to at the exact moment a caller attempts modification.
Customer Relationship Management. Technology for managing all your company's relationships and interactions with customers and potential customers.
Customer Relationship Management. Technology for managing all your company's relationships and interactions with customers and potential customers.
Cross-Site Request Forgery. An attack that forces an end user to execute unwanted actions on a web application in which they are currently authenticated.
A European Union proposal to introduces common cybersecurity rules for manufacturers and developers of products with digital elements, covering both hardware and software.
A dictionary of publicly disclosed cybersecurity vulnerabilities and exposures that provides a standardized identifier (CVE-YYYY-NNNNN) to enable organizations, researchers, and automated tools to correlate, track, and patch security flaws across software systems.
An open industry standard for assessing and communicating the severity and risk characteristics of software vulnerabilities, producing a numerical score from 0.0 to 10.0 based on exploitability metrics and impact on confidentiality, integrity, and availability.
Directed Acyclic Graph. A finite directed graph with no directed cycles. It consists of vertices and edges, with each edge directed from one vertex to another, such that there is no way to start at any vertex v and follow a consistently-directed sequence of edges that eventually loops back to v.
The World Wide Web content that exists on darknets, overlay networks that use the Internet but require specific software, configurations, or authorization to access.
A new, open data management architecture that combines the flexibility, cost-efficiency, and scale of data lakes with the data management and ACID transactions of data warehouses.
The lifecycle that includes the data's origins and where it moves over time. It describes what happens to data as it passes through diverse processes.
A condition where data is unevenly distributed across partitions in a distributed system. This leads to some tasks taking much longer than others (stragglers).
Distributed Denial of Service. A malicious attempt to disrupt the normal traffic of a targeted server, service, or network by overwhelming the target or its surrounding infrastructure with a flood of Internet traffic from multiple sources.
A situation where a set of processes are blocked because each process is holding a resource and waiting for another resource acquired by some other process.
A type of long-term business debt not secured by physical assets or collateral. It is backed only by the general creditworthiness and reputation of the issuer.
In the context of HTML scripts, a boolean attribute indicating that the script should be executed after the document has been parsed. In Go, a statement that schedules a function call to be run after the function completes.
General, reusable solutions to a commonly occurring problem within a given context in software design.
The process of reducing the number of random variables under consideration by obtaining a set of principal variables. It simplifies models and reduces computation time.
A high-profile Linux kernel vulnerability (CVE-2016-5195) caused by a race condition in the memory management subsystem handling Copy-on-Write (COW) page faults. It allowed unprivileged local users to write to read-only memory mappings, enabling trivial privilege escalation to root.
Domain Name System. The phonebook of the Internet. It translates human-readable domain names (like google.com) to machine-readable IP addresses.
Denial of Service. Similar to DDoS, but the attack originates from a single source.
The act of publicly revealing previously private personal information about an individual or organization, usually through the Internet. It is often used as a form of online harassment or vigilantism.
Don't Repeat Yourself. A principle of software development aimed at reducing repetition of software patterns, replacing it with abstractions or using data normalization to avoid redundancy.
A method for solving complex problems by breaking them down into simpler subproblems. It is applicable to problems exhibiting the properties of overlapping subproblems and optimal substructure.
A type system where type checks are performed at runtime. Variables are not bound to a specific type and can hold value of any type during execution.
A revolutionary Linux kernel technology that executes sandboxed bytecode directly within the kernel space without altering kernel source code or inserting risky kernel modules. A static in-kernel verifier ensures programs cannot crash the host system or loop infinitely.
A distributed computing paradigm that brings computation and data storage closer to the sources of data. This is expected to improve response times and save bandwidth.
Low-dimensional, continuous vector representations of discrete variables (like words or items). They capture semantic relationships where similar items are closer in the vector space.
The process of encoding information. This process converts the original representation of the information, known as plaintext, into an alternative form known as ciphertext.
Enterprise Resource Planning. Software used by organizations to manage day-to-day business activities such as accounting, procurement, project management, risk management and compliance, and supply chain operations.
Enterprise Resource Planning. Software used by organizations to manage their day-to-day business activities such as accounting, procurement, project management, and supply chain operations.
ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) transforms data before loading it into the target system. ELT (Extract, Load, Transform) loads raw data first and then transforms it within the target system (typically a cloud data warehouse).
The mechanism that allows JavaScript to perform non-blocking I/O operations despite being single-threaded. It constantly checks if the call stack is empty and if the callback queue has pending tasks to process.
A software architecture paradigm promoting the production, detection, consumption of, and reaction to events.
A guarantee in stream processing that each record will be processed exactly once, even in the event of failures. No data is lost, and no data is processed twice.
The harmonic mean of Precision and Recall. It provides a single score that balances both the concerns of precision and recall in one number.
A centralized repository that stores curated features for machine learning. It ensures consistency between training and inference environments.
First Expired, First Out. An inventory management method where products with the earliest expiration dates are sold or used first.
A modern, promise-based API for making network requests in the browser. It is a replacement for the older XMLHttpRequest (XHR).
First In, First Out. A method for organizing and manipulating a data buffer, where the oldest (first) entry, or 'head' of the queue, is processed first.
First In, Last Out. Also known as LIFO (Last In, First Out). The first element added is the last one to be removed.
An open-source Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) developed by AWS and written in Rust. It utilizes the Linux Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) to provision ultra-fast, minimalist MicroVMs that combine the isolation of hardware virtualization with the speed and density of containers.
The process of taking a pre-trained model (which has learned general features) and training it further on a specific dataset to adapt it to a specific task.
A denial-of-service attack where a process continually replicates itself using the fork() system call, consuming all available process identifiers (PIDs), CPU cycles, and memory until the operating system freezes and cannot spawn new processes.
Free and Open Source Software. Software that is both free (as in freedom) and open source. Anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way.
The study of mathematical models of strategic interaction among rational decision-makers. It has applications in all fields of social science, as well as in logic, systems science and computer science.
A form of psychological manipulation in which a person or group covertly sows seeds of doubt in a targeted individual, making them question their own memory, perception, or judgment.
A function that can be paused and resumed. It is declared with `function*` and uses the `yield` keyword to return values one by one.
A peer-to-peer communication protocol where information spreads like a virus (or rumor) through the network. Nodes periodically exchange state information with random peers.
Graphics Processing Unit. A specialized electronic circuit designed to rapidly manipulate and alter memory to accelerate the creation of images. Now heavily used for parallel processing in AI.
A non-linear data structure consisting of nodes (vertices) and edges. Graphs are used to represent networks.
A query language for APIs and a runtime for fulfilling those queries with your existing data. It allows clients to request exactly the data they need and nothing more.
In IT, widely known as a tool for validating, documenting, and profiling your data to maintain quality and improve communication between teams.
A high-performance, open-source universal RPC (Remote Procedure Call) framework. It uses HTTP/2 for transport, Protocol Buffers as the interface description language, and provides features like authentication, load balancing, and more.
A phenomenon where an AI model generates incorrect, nonsensical, or unreal information but presents it as fact.
A data structure that implements an associative array abstract data type, a structure that can map keys to values. It uses a hash function to compute an index into an array of buckets or slots.
The process of transforming any given key or a string of characters into another value. This is usually represented by a shorter, fixed-length value or key that represents and indexes the original string.
A function that takes one or more functions as arguments, or returns a function as its result.
Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. A US federal law that establishes national standards to protect sensitive patient health information from being disclosed without the patient's consent.
A methodological approach to the study of society, economics, and history, pioneered by Karl Marx, which argues that the material conditions of a society's mode of production fundamentally determine its organization and development.
Human Intelligence. Intelligence gathered by means of interpersonal contact, as opposed to the more technical intelligence gathering disciplines such as signals intelligence (SIGINT) or imagery intelligence (IMINT).
Configuration settings used to tune how a model is trained. Unlike parameters (weights), they are not learned from the data but set before training.
A software, firmware, or hardware virtualization layer (also known as a Virtual Machine Monitor or VMM) that creates, runs, and isolates virtual machines by abstracting host CPU, memory, and I/O devices among multiple concurrent guest operating systems.
Infrastructure as Code. The process of managing and provisioning computer data centers through machine-readable definition files, rather than physical hardware configuration or interactive configuration tools.
A property of certain operations in mathematics and computer science whereby they can be applied multiple times without changing the result beyond the initial application.
Identity Provider. A system entity that creates, maintains, and manages identity information for principals (users, services) and provides authentication services to relying applications.
Immediately Invoked Function Expression. A JavaScript function that runs as soon as it is defined.
The stage in machine learning where a trained model is used to make predictions on new, unseen data.
A critical vulnerability that occurs when untrusted or tampered serialized data is processed by an application, allowing an attacker to manipulate object state, bypass access controls, or achieve Remote Code Execution (RCE) via gadget chains.
A level of software testing where individual units are combined and tested as a group. The purpose is to expose faults in the interaction between integrated units.
An international standard on how to manage information security. It details requirements for establishing, implementing, maintaining and continually improving an information security management system (ISMS).
A security standard that provides guidelines for information security controls applicable to the provision and use of cloud services.
A code of practice that focuses on protection of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) in public clouds. It establishes commonly accepted control objectives, controls and guidelines for implementing measures to protect PII.
An object that defines a sequence and a return value upon its termination. It implements the Iterator protocol with a `next()` method.
JSON Web Token. An open standard (RFC 7519) that defines a compact and self-contained way for securely transmitting information between parties as a JSON object.
Kubernetes. An open-source container orchestration system for automating software deployment, scaling, and management.
A software architecture pattern that treats all data processing as stream processing. It simplifies the Lambda architecture by removing the batch layer.
Keep It Simple, Stupid. A design principle noting that systems perform best when they have simple designs rather than complex ones.
Key Performance Indicator. A quantifiable measure used to evaluate the success of an organization, employee, etc. in meeting objectives for performance.
A full virtualization subsystem built into the Linux kernel that turns the Linux operating system into a Type-1 bare-metal hypervisor. It exposes CPU hardware virtualization extensions (Intel VT-x and AMD-V) to user space through the /dev/kvm character device.
A data-processing architecture designed to handle massive quantities of data by taking advantage of both batch- and stream-processing methods.
A psychometric scale commonly involved in research that employs questionnaires. It is the most widely used approach to scaling responses in survey research.
Large Language Model. A type of artificial intelligence model designed to understand and generate human language. They are trained on vast amounts of text data.
The process of distributing network traffic across multiple servers. This ensures no single server bears too much demand.
A function that quantifies the difference between the predicted output and the actual output. The goal of training is to minimize this value.
Log-Structured Merge-tree. A data structure used in many modern NoSQL databases. It optimizes for write performance by buffering writes in memory and flushing them to disk as immutable sorted files.
A programming model and an associated implementation for processing and generating big data sets with a parallel, distributed algorithm on a cluster.
Museu de Arte de São Paulo (São Paulo Museum of Art). A famous museum in Brazil known for its concrete and glass architecture designed by Lina Bo Bardi.
An architectural style that structures an application as a collection of loosely coupled services. Each service implements a specific business capability and can be developed, deployed, and scaled independently.
Ultra-lightweight virtual machines designed for multi-tenant cloud-native environments. MicroVMs strip out legacy PC peripherals and emulated hardware to boot a full guest Linux kernel in under 5 milliseconds with just a few megabytes of memory overhead, bridging the gap between container speed and hypervisor security.
Machine Learning Operations. A set of practices that aims to deploy and maintain machine learning models in production reliably and efficiently.
A cyberattack where an unauthorized actor secretly intercepts, relays, and potentially alters communication between two parties who believe they are communicating directly with each other in private.
Techniques used in testing to simulate the behavior of real objects. Mocks verify behavior (e.g., 'was this function called?'), while Stubs provide canned answers to calls.
The degradation of a model's performance over time as the statistical properties of the input data change compared to the training data.
A centralized repository for managing the lifecycle of ML models. It tracks versions, lineage, and metadata of models.
An architecture where the application is built as a single, unified unit. All components (UI, business logic, data access) are interconnected and interdependent.
A programming and execution model that allows multiple threads to exist within the context of a single process, sharing process resources but executing independently.
Model-View-Controller. A software design pattern commonly used for developing user interfaces that divides the related program logic into three interconnected elements.
Multi-Version Concurrency Control. A concurrency control method commonly used by database management systems to provide concurrent access to the database and in programming languages to implement transactional memory.
Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment. A theoretical level of unemployment below which inflation would be expected to rise. It represents the equilibrium between the state of the economy and the labor market.
Non-Fungible Token. A unique digital identifier that cannot be copied, substituted, or subdivided, that is recorded in a blockchain, and that is used to certify authenticity and ownership.
Natural Language Processing. A subfield of linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human language.
The process of organizing data in a database. This includes creating tables and establishing relationships between those tables according to rules designed both to protect the data and to make the database more flexible by eliminating redundancy and inconsistent dependency.
Techniques to scale numerical features. Normalization scales data to a range (e.g., 0 to 1). Standardization scales data to have a mean of 0 and standard deviation of 1.
Open Authorization. An open standard for access delegation, commonly used as a way for Internet users to grant websites or applications access to their information on other websites but without giving them the passwords.
A process of converting categorical data variables so they can be provided to machine learning algorithms to improve predictions. It creates a binary column for each category.
Object-Oriented Programming. A programming paradigm based on the concept of 'objects', which can contain data and code: data in the form of fields (attributes), and code in the form of procedures (methods).
Optimized Row Columnar. A self-describing, type-aware columnar file format designed for Hadoop workloads. It is highly optimized for Hive reads and writes.
The automated configuration, coordination, and management of computer systems and software. In the context of containers, it manages the lifecycle of containers.
Object-Relational Mapping. A programming technique for converting data between incompatible type systems using object-oriented programming languages. It creates a 'virtual object database' that can be used from within the programming language.
Open Systems Interconnection model. A conceptual model that creates a universal language for computer networking. It splits the communication system into seven abstraction layers.
A modeling error where a function is too closely fit to a limited set of data points. The model learns the noise and details of the training data to the extent that it negatively impacts the performance on new data.
Platform as a Service. A cloud computing model in which a third-party provider delivers hardware and software tools to users over the internet. Users access these tools for application development.
An extension of the CAP theorem that states: in case of a partition (P), one has to choose between availability (A) and consistency (C), but else (E), even when the system is running normally in the absence of partitions, one has to choose between latency (L) and consistency (C).
A column-oriented data storage format for the Hadoop ecosystem. It provides efficient data compression and encoding schemes with enhanced performance to handle complex data in bulk.
A security vulnerability that allows an attacker to access restricted files and directories located outside the web root or storage sandbox by manipulating file path variables with dot-dot-slash ('../') sequences.
The division of a logical database or its constituent elements into distinct independent parts. Database partitioning is normally done for manageability, performance or availability reasons.
Variables that store the memory address of another variable. They are a fundamental feature in languages like C and C++ for manual memory management.
The exploitation of a software bug, architectural design flaw, or configuration error to gain higher permission levels than intended. Attackers leverage privilege escalation to transition from a restricted user account to administrative or root control.
The ratio of correctly predicted positive observations to the total predicted positives. It answers: 'Of all the instances predicted as positive, how many were actually positive?'
An object representing the eventual completion (or failure) of an asynchronous operation and its resulting value.
An object that wraps another object and intercepts operations, such as reading/writing properties, allowing you to define custom behavior.
A linear data structure that follows the First-In-First-Out (FIFO) principle.
A condition where the system's substantive behavior is dependent on the sequence or timing of other uncontrollable events. It becomes a bug when one or more of the possible behaviors is undesirable.
A condition where the system's substantive behavior is dependent on the sequence or timing of other uncontrollable events. Terraform tries to create new resources without finishing the deletion of the former ones.
Retrieval-Augmented Generation. A technique that enhances the accuracy and reliability of generative AI models with facts fetched from external sources.
A type of malware that encrypts a victim's files, with the attacker demanding a ransom from the victim to restore access to the data.
The ratio of correctly predicted positive observations to the all observations in actual class. It answers: 'Of all the actual positive instances, how many did we predict correctly?'
A programming technique where a function calls itself to solve a problem by breaking it down into smaller, self-similar sub-problems.
An algorithmic complexity attack where a specially crafted input string causes a vulnerable regular expression to perform catastrophic backtracking, consuming exponential CPU time and locking the execution thread.
A type of machine learning where an agent learns to make decisions by performing actions in an environment and receiving rewards or penalties.
The process of storing the same data in multiple locations to improve data availability and accessibility, and to improve system resilience and reliability.
Representational State Transfer. An architectural style for designing networked applications. It relies on a stateless, client-server, cacheable communications protocol -- and in virtually all cases, the HTTP protocol is used.
Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback. A machine learning technique that trains a reward model directly from human feedback and uses the model as a reward function to optimize an agent's policy using reinforcement learning.
Receiver Operating Characteristic. A graphical plot that illustrates the diagnostic ability of a binary classifier system as its discrimination threshold is varied.
A clandestine collection of software tools designed to maintain persistent, privileged (root/administrator) access to a compromised system while actively concealing its presence, processes, files, and network activity from detection tools and system administrators.
The Russian-language community on the Internet and websites hosted in Russia. It can also refer to the infrastructure of the internet within Russia.
Software as a Service. A software licensing and delivery model in which software is licensed on a subscription basis and is centrally hosted.
The context in which values and expressions are visible or can be referenced. It determines the accessibility of variables.
Serialization is the process of converting a data structure or object state into a format that can be stored or transmitted (like JSON or XML). Deserialization is the reverse process.
A cloud computing execution model where the cloud provider runs the server, and dynamically manages the allocation of machine resources. Pricing is based on the actual amount of resources consumed by an application, rather than on pre-purchased units of capacity.
The implementation or use of artificial intelligence within an organization without the knowledge or approval of the IT department.
A database architecture pattern related to horizontal partitioning — the practice of separating one table's rows into multiple different tables, known as partitions.
The process of redistributing data across partitions (and often across the network) during a distributed computation. It typically occurs during operations like groupByKey, reduceByKey, or join.
Stock Keeping Unit. A scannable bar code, most often seen printed on product labels in a retail store. The label allows vendors to automatically track the movement of inventory.
A mnemonic acronym for five design principles intended to make software designs more understandable, flexible, and maintainable.
SQL Injection. A code injection technique where an attacker executes malicious SQL statements that control a web application's database server.
A web security vulnerability that allows an attacker to induce the server-side application to make HTTP requests to an arbitrary domain or internal resource, bypassing network firewalls and querying sensitive internal services.
A linear data structure that follows the Last-In-First-Out (LIFO) principle.
A mechanism used in Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to prevent concurrent operations on the same state file, which could corrupt the state.
A type system where variable types are known and checked at compile-time. This means you must declare the type of a variable before you can use it.
Standard response codes given by web servers on the Internet. They indicate whether a specific HTTP request has been successfully completed.
A type system that enforces strict restrictions on mixing different data types. Implicit type conversions are generally not allowed.
A type of machine learning where the model is trained on labeled data, meaning the input comes with the correct output. The model learns to map inputs to outputs.
Refers to code execution where tasks are performed one at a time. The program waits for a task to finish before moving on to the next one. It is blocking.
Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol. The set of communications protocols used in the Internet and similar computer networks.
A cybersecurity defense mechanism or network service that intentionally delays server responses to an incoming connection, designed to slow down automated scanners, spam bots, and brute-force attackers while consuming their connection pools.
Test-Driven Development. A software development process relying on software requirements being converted to test cases before software is fully developed.
Test of English as a Foreign Language. A standardized test to measure the English language ability of non-native speakers wishing to enroll in English-speaking universities.
Test of English for International Communication. A standardized test designed to measure English skills for people working in an international environment.
A geopolitical and strategic principle describing the severe tendency toward war when a rising power threatens to displace an established ruling hegemon, creating mutual paranoia and structural instability.
A deep learning architecture introduced in 2017 that relies primarily on the self-attention mechanism. It has revolutionized NLP and is the foundation of models like BERT and GPT.
The extent to which a programming language discourages or prevents type errors. It ensures that operations are performed on the correct data types.
User Datagram Protocol. A communications protocol that is primarily used for establishing low-latency and loss-tolerating connections between applications on the internet.
A modeling error where the model is too simple to capture the underlying structure of the data. It performs poorly on both training and testing data.
A level of software testing where individual units/components of a software are tested. The purpose is to validate that each unit of the software performs as designed.
A type of machine learning where the model is trained on unlabeled data. It tries to find patterns, structures, or relationships in the data without explicit guidance.
Coordinated Universal Time. The primary time standard by which the world regulates clocks and time. It is essentially the successor to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT).
A database designed to store and query high-dimensional vectors. They are optimized for similarity search (finding the 'nearest neighbors').
The act of creating a virtual (rather than actual) version of something, including virtual computer hardware platforms, storage devices, and computer network resources.
The primary software component in a virtualization system responsible for orchestrating virtual machine instances. The VMM sets up guest memory mappings, configures virtual CPUs (vCPUs), traps privileged instructions, and handles virtual device I/O (virtio).
Virtual Machine. An emulation of a computer system. VMs provide the functionality of a physical computer and their implementations may involve specialized hardware, software, or a combination.
A leading provider of multi-cloud services for all apps, enabling digital innovation with enterprise control. Famous for its virtualization software.
Virtual Private Cloud. An on-demand configurable pool of shared computing resources allocated within a public cloud environment, providing a certain level of isolation between the different organizations using the resources.
Virtual Private Server. A virtual machine sold as a service by an Internet hosting service. It runs its own copy of an operating system, and customers have superuser-level access to that operating system instance.
Write-Ahead Logging. A standard method for ensuring data integrity. Modifications are written to a log file before they are applied to the database files.
In stream processing, a watermark is a threshold that indicates how late data can arrive and still be processed. It allows the system to handle out-of-order data.
A type system that allows considerable implicit type conversions. The language may treat a value of one type as another if needed.
Wasm. A binary instruction format for a stack-based virtual machine. Wasm is designed as a portable compilation target for programming languages, enabling deployment on the web for client and server applications.
A method of augmenting or altering the behavior of a web page or web application with custom callbacks. These functions are often triggered by third-party users and developers.
A computer communications protocol, providing full-duplex communication channels over a single TCP connection.
Workload Identity Federation. A method that allows you to grant on-premises or multi-cloud workloads access to cloud resources without using long-lived service account keys.
SQL functions that perform a calculation across a set of table rows that are somehow related to the current row. Unlike aggregate functions, they do not cause rows to become grouped into a single output row.
Wi-Fi Protected Access 3. The third iteration of a security certification program developed by the Wi-Fi Alliance. It provides significant security enhancements over WPA2.
Cross-Site Scripting. A security vulnerability that allows attackers to inject malicious client-side scripts into web pages viewed by other users.
You Aren't Gonna Need It. A principle of extreme programming (XP) that states a programmer should not add functionality until deemed necessary.
A computer operation in which the CPU does not perform the task of copying data from one memory area to another. This is frequently used to save CPU cycles and memory bandwidth.
A software vulnerability that is undisclosed to the vendor or public, or recently discovered without an available security patch. The name signifies that developers and defenders have had 'zero days' to create and deploy a countermeasure, leaving systems vulnerable to active exploitation.
A malicious archive file designed to crash or incapacitate the reading system by consuming vast amounts of disk space, memory, or CPU time when uncompressed, exploiting extreme compression ratios without containing executable malware.