Intermediate terms
Brute-Force Protection
Defences against automated credential-guessing attacks — rate limiting login attempts, account lockout, CAPTCHA, and multi-factor authentication to make guessing passwords computationally infeasible.
CWE-307 OWASP A7:2021
6mo ago
Security intermediate
Backpressure
Backpressure signals upstream producers to slow down when downstream consumers can't keep up — preventing queue overflow, memory exhaustion, and system collapse under load.
6mo ago
Messaging intermediate
Bidirectional Text (BiDi)
1
The handling of text that mixes left-to-right (LTR) and right-to-left (RTL) scripts in the same document — governed by the Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm, with CSS and HTML direction attributes controlling display.
6mo ago
i18n intermediate
BigInt — Arbitrary Precision Integers
ES2020
JavaScript's Number type cannot safely represent integers larger than 2⁵³−1 (Number.MAX_SAFE_INTEGER). BigInt is a separate numeric type that handles integers of arbitrary size, essential for working with 64-bit IDs from databases, cryptographic values, and precise financial calculations.
6mo ago
JavaScript intermediate
BM25 Ranking
1
Best Match 25 — the industry-standard relevance ranking algorithm used by Elasticsearch, Lucene, and SQLite FTS5, refining TF-IDF with better document length normalisation and a term frequency saturation parameter.
6mo ago
Search intermediate
BroadcastChannel — Cross-Tab Messaging
HTML5
BroadcastChannel allows same-origin pages/tabs to communicate — post a message on one tab, receive it in all others — without a server or service worker.
6mo ago
JavaScript intermediate
Brotli vs gzip Compression
PHP 5.0+
Brotli (br) compresses 15-25% better than gzip for text content — use Brotli for supported browsers (all modern ones), gzip as fallback, both configured at the server level not PHP.
6mo ago
Performance intermediate
Bytecode VMs
PHP 5.0+
1
Zend Engine (PHP), JVM (Java/Kotlin), CLR (.NET) — all compile source to platform-independent bytecode then interpret or JIT-compile to native code.
6mo ago
Compiler intermediate
Bash Scripting
bash4
1
Writing shell scripts in Bash to automate command-line tasks — from simple file operations to complex deployment pipelines.
6mo ago
Linux intermediate
Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD)
PHP 5.0+
2
A development practice where tests are written in business-readable language (Given/When/Then) that domain experts, developers, and testers all understand.
6mo ago
Testing intermediate
Big-O Notation
PHP 5.0+
6
A mathematical notation describing how an algorithm's time or space requirements grow relative to input size, ignoring constants and lower-order terms.
6mo ago
Algorithms intermediate
Binary Trees
PHP 5.0+
5
A hierarchical structure where each node has at most two children — Binary Search Trees enable O(log n) search, while balanced variants (AVL, Red-Black) guarantee it.
6mo ago
Data Structures intermediate
bind_param()
PHP 5.1+
3
MySQLi method that binds PHP variables to prepared statement parameters, preventing SQL injection.
6mo ago
PHP intermediate
Bit Manipulation
1
Using bitwise operators (AND, OR, XOR, NOT, shifts) to manipulate individual bits — enabling compact storage, fast arithmetic, and O(1) set operations.
6mo ago
Algorithms intermediate
Blameless Post-Mortem
PHP 5.0+
3
A structured review of an incident focused on systemic causes and improvements, not individual blame — making it safe to surface failures.
6mo ago
DevOps intermediate
Blue/Green Deployment
PHP 5.0+
6
Maintaining two identical production environments and switching traffic between them for zero-downtime releases and instant rollback.
6mo ago
DevOps intermediate
Broken Access Control
PHP 5.0+
1
Failure to enforce what authenticated users are allowed to do — the #1 OWASP vulnerability, enabling privilege escalation and data exposure.
CWE-284 OWASP A1:2021
6mo ago
Security intermediate
8.8
Brooks's Law
1
"Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later" — new developers require onboarding time and increase communication overhead before contributing productively.
6mo ago
General intermediate
Builder Pattern
PHP 5.0+
1
Constructs complex objects step-by-step using a fluent interface, separating construction from representation.
6mo ago
Code Quality intermediate
Built-in PHP Attributes
PHP 8.0+
PHP 8.0+ ships built-in attributes — #[Deprecated], #[Override], #[AllowDynamicProperties], #[SensitiveParameter] — for tooling and runtime hints.
6mo ago
PHP intermediate