Code Terms Starting With C — Glossary

Sort A → Z Recently Added Recently Updated Difficulty Most Viewed Most Rated Most Shared

DEBT Burden Trap Effort Detectability ↓ Desc ↑ Asc

Level All Beginner Intermediate Advanced

✕ Clear A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Patterns for when and how to store and invalidate cached data — cache-aside, write-through, write-behind, and read-through each make different trade-offs between consistency, complexity, and performance.

6mo ago Performance intermediate

Canary Deployment & Observability

Canary deployments route a small percentage of traffic to a new version — compare its golden signals against the stable version before full rollout to catch regressions automatically.

6mo ago Observability intermediate

Canvas API — 2D Drawing HTML5

The HTML Canvas API provides a 2D drawing surface via JavaScript — used for charts, image manipulation, games, data visualisations, and any pixel-level rendering that DOM elements cannot efficiently handle.

6mo ago JavaScript intermediate

Capture Groups & Backreferences PHP 5.3+ 🧠 5

Parentheses in a regex pattern create capture groups that store matched substrings for extraction or reuse — backreferences let you match the same text again later in the pattern or replacement string.

6mo ago Regex beginner

Cardinality in Metrics

Cardinality is the number of unique label value combinations — high cardinality (user_id, URL, session_id as labels) creates millions of time series and crashes Prometheus.

6mo ago Observability intermediate

Cardinality in Observability PHP 7.0+

The number of unique combinations of label values in a metric — high cardinality (millions of unique label combinations) causes memory exhaustion in time-series databases and is the most common observability scaling problem.

6mo ago Observability intermediate

Catastrophic Backtracking PHP 5.3+ 🧠 3

A regex engine failure mode where certain patterns combined with specific inputs cause exponential backtracking, making the match take seconds or minutes — a common denial-of-service vector called ReDoS.

6mo ago Regex intermediate

Chain-of-Thought Prompting 🧠 1

A prompting technique that instructs an LLM to show its reasoning step-by-step before giving a final answer, significantly improving accuracy on complex tasks.

6mo ago AI / ML beginner

Change Data Capture (CDC)

A pattern for tracking and streaming every insert, update, and delete from a database — by reading the database's internal transaction log rather than polling tables — enabling real-time event-driven integrations without impacting query performance.

6mo ago Database advanced

Clipboard API HTML5 🧠 1

The async Clipboard API (navigator.clipboard) is the modern replacement for document.execCommand('copy') — supports text, images, and rich content with proper permission handling.

6mo ago JavaScript beginner

Code Readability Metrics

Readability can be measured — cyclomatic complexity, cognitive complexity (SonarQube), lines per function, parameter count, and nesting depth are all quantifiable proxies for readability.

6mo ago Code Quality intermediate

Collation & Locale-Aware Sorting PHP 7.0+ 🧠 1

Locale-specific rules for ordering strings alphabetically — determining that ä sorts near a in German but after z in traditional Swedish, and that sorting must not rely on byte values for Unicode text.

6mo ago i18n intermediate

Compare-And-Swap (CAS) 🧠 1

CAS atomically compares a memory location to an expected value and only swaps it if equal — the foundation of lock-free algorithms and optimistic concurrency control.

6mo ago Concurrency advanced

Concurrency vs Parallelism 🧠 2

Concurrency is about dealing with multiple tasks at once (structuring); parallelism is actually executing multiple tasks simultaneously (hardware). You can have one without the other.

6mo ago Concurrency beginner

Consistent Hashing

A hashing technique used in distributed systems where adding or removing a node rebalances only a fraction of keys rather than remapping everything — essential for distributed caches, load balancers, and sharded databases.

6mo ago Architecture advanced

const Type Parameters (TS 5.0) 5.0

TypeScript 5.0 const type parameters infer literal types instead of widened types — const T extends string[] infers ['a','b'] not string[].

6mo ago TypeScript intermediate

Consumer Groups 🧠 1

Consumer groups allow multiple consumers to process messages from a topic in parallel — each partition assigned to one consumer, enabling horizontal scaling without duplicate processing.

6mo ago Messaging intermediate

Copy-on-Write (CoW) in PHP Arrays PHP 7.0+ 🧠 1

PHP arrays are not copied when assigned or passed to functions — they share the same internal buffer until one copy is modified. Only then does PHP perform a real copy. This makes reading large arrays cheap but silent mutations expensive.

6mo ago PHP intermediate

Correlation ID Pattern 🧠 3

A correlation ID is a unique identifier attached to every request and propagated through all logs, services, and queues — enabling end-to-end request tracing through string search.

6mo ago Observability beginner

CORS — Cross-Origin Resource Sharing PHP 7.0+

A browser security mechanism that blocks JavaScript from making HTTP requests to a different origin — PHP APIs must send specific headers to allow cross-origin requests from permitted frontend origins.

6mo ago Security intermediate

← Prev 1 2 3 4 … 9 Next →

Terms starting with "C"