Intermediate terms
Message Queue Patterns
Core messaging patterns — competing consumers, scatter-gather, request-reply, message filter, and routing slip — solve recurring distributed communication challenges.
6mo ago
Messaging intermediate
Message Serialization (Avro/Protobuf)
Binary serialization formats (Avro, Protobuf, MessagePack) are faster and smaller than JSON for high-throughput messaging — with schema evolution support for Avro.
6mo ago
Messaging intermediate
Method Chaining Pitfalls & Alternatives
Method chaining (fluent interfaces) improves readability for builders but creates debugging difficulties, encourages temporal coupling, and can hide null returns.
6mo ago
Code Quality intermediate
Migrating from PHP 4 to PHP 5
PHP 4.0+
PHP 4→5 migration: objects now pass by reference, add visibility (public/protected/private), replace var with typed properties, fix object assignment semantics, and adopt try/catch.
6mo ago
PHP intermediate
Migrating from PHP 7 to PHP 8
PHP 7.0+
PHP 7→8 migration: fix type coercion changes (stricter), remove deprecated functions (each(), create_function()), update match/constructor promotion, check third-party compatibility.
6mo ago
PHP intermediate
MutationObserver API
HTML5
1
MutationObserver watches DOM tree changes — attribute changes, child additions/removals, text content changes — without polling or event listener on each node.
6mo ago
JavaScript intermediate
Mutex & Locking
3
A mutex (mutual exclusion lock) ensures only one thread/process can access a critical section at a time — the fundamental primitive for preventing race conditions.
6mo ago
Concurrency intermediate
match() Default Arm vs No Default
PHP 8.0+
match() without a default arm throws UnhandledMatchError if no arm matches — unlike switch, which silently falls through.
6mo ago
PHP intermediate
Migrating from PHP 5.x to PHP 7 and 8
PHP 5.0+
PHP 7 removed mysql_*, ereg functions, and several deprecated features — a systematic approach using Rector and PHPCompatibility catches 95% of issues automatically.
6mo ago
PHP intermediate
Managed Databases
1
Cloud-hosted database services where the provider manages patching, backups, failover, and scaling — RDS (AWS), Cloud SQL (GCP), Azure Database — trading control for operational simplicity.
6mo ago
Cloud intermediate
Meilisearch & Typesense
PHP 7.0+
2
Open-source, self-hosted search engines with PHP SDKs — fast BM25 search, typo-tolerance, and faceting without the operational complexity of Elasticsearch.
6mo ago
Search intermediate
Memento Pattern
PHP 5.0+
A behavioural pattern that captures an object's internal state and stores it externally so it can be restored later — enabling undo, snapshots, and versioning without exposing internals.
6mo ago
Code Quality intermediate
Memory Management — Stack vs Heap
PHP 5.0+
2
The stack holds function call frames with fixed-size local variables — fast, automatic, limited. The heap holds dynamically allocated objects — flexible, managed by GC, slower.
6mo ago
Compiler intermediate
Message Serialisation
JSON (readable, flexible), Avro (schema-enforced, compact, Kafka standard), Protobuf (typed, 5-10x smaller) — matching format to volume and schema requirements.
6mo ago
Messaging intermediate
MIME Sniffing & X-Content-Type-Options
PHP 5.0+
Browsers that sniff file content to guess MIME type can execute uploaded HTML/JavaScript files as scripts — X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff prevents this.
6mo ago
Security intermediate
Missing CSRF Protection
PHP 5.0+
A state-changing form or endpoint that lacks a CSRF token allows attackers to forge authenticated requests from any website the victim visits.
6mo ago
Security intermediate
ML Types
Supervised (labelled examples), unsupervised (find patterns), reinforcement learning (reward signals), and self-supervised (model creates its own labels).
6mo ago
AI / ML intermediate
Mobile Web Performance
Optimising web applications for mobile constraints — slower CPUs, limited RAM, high-latency 4G/5G, and battery sensitivity require different optimisation priorities than desktop.
6mo ago
Mobile intermediate
Magic Methods (__get, __set, __call…)
PHP 5.0+
1
Special PHP methods invoked automatically in response to language events — property access, method calls, serialisation, and more.
6mo ago
PHP intermediate
Maintainability Index
5
A composite metric (0–100) combining Halstead volume, cyclomatic complexity, and lines of code to estimate how easy code is to maintain.
6mo ago
Code Quality intermediate