Terms starting with "A"
async / await in JavaScript ES2017
async functions always return a Promise; await pauses execution inside an async function until a Promise settles — giving asynchronous code the readability of synchronous code without blocking the event loop.
4w ago
javascript intermediate
API Versioning
Strategies for evolving an API without breaking existing consumers — URI versioning, header versioning, and content negotiation.
1mo ago
api_design intermediate
AI Alignment The research and engineering discipline of ensuring AI systems pursue goals that are consistent with human values, intentions, and safety — not just stated objectives.
1mo ago
ai_ml advanced
AI Context Poisoning An adversarial technique where malicious instructions are injected into an LLM's context window — via user input, retrieved documents, or tool results — to hijack the model's behaviour.
1mo ago
ai_ml advanced
AI Governance The policies, processes, and organisational structures that ensure AI systems are developed, deployed, and monitored responsibly — covering accountability, fairness, transparency, and compliance.
1mo ago
ai_ml advanced
AI Guardrails Runtime constraints and safety filters applied around LLM calls to detect, block, or rewrite inputs and outputs that are harmful, off-topic, or policy-violating.
1mo ago
ai_ml intermediate
AI Observability The practice of monitoring, tracing, and evaluating LLM-powered systems in production — covering latency, token costs, prompt drift, output quality, and failure modes.
1mo ago
ai_ml intermediate
Accessible Data Tables
HTML tables marked up with correct semantic elements and ARIA roles so screen readers can announce cell context — column header, row header, and position — to the user.
1mo ago
accessibility beginner
A* Pathfinding Algorithm
Heuristic search algorithm that finds the lowest-cost path using f(n)=g(n)+h(n), widely used in maps and game AI.
2mo ago
algorithms advanced
Abstract readonly Properties PHP 8.4+
PHP 8.4 allows abstract readonly properties in abstract classes and interfaces — defining that implementations must provide a readonly property of a specific type.
2mo ago
php advanced
Actor Model
The Actor Model treats everything as an actor — isolated units that communicate only by message passing, never sharing state — eliminating race conditions by design.
2mo ago
concurrency advanced
AI Agent Pattern
An LLM-powered system that takes multi-step actions autonomously — calling tools, reading results, and deciding next steps in a loop until a goal is achieved.
2mo ago
ai_ml advanced
Alerting Best Practices
Good alerts are actionable, symptom-based, and rare — page on user impact, not causes. Alert fatigue from noisy alerts is as dangerous as no alerts.
2mo ago
observability intermediate
Anchors & Word Boundaries PHP 5.3+
Zero-width assertions that match positions rather than characters — ^ matches start of string, $ matches end, \b matches a word boundary — ensuring patterns match in the correct location.
2mo ago
regex beginner
Anonymous Functions / Closures (PHP 5.3) PHP 5.3+
PHP 5.3 introduced anonymous functions (closures) — function() {} expressions assignable to variables, passable as callbacks, and able to capture outer scope with use().
2mo ago
php intermediate
Apache Kafka Concepts
Kafka is a distributed log — producers append to immutable, ordered topics partitioned for parallelism, consumers read at their own pace and replay from any offset.
2mo ago
messaging intermediate
Apache Kafka Fundamentals PHP 7.0+
A distributed event streaming platform that stores messages as an immutable ordered log partitioned across a cluster — optimised for high-throughput, durable, replayable event streams rather than traditional task queues.
2mo ago
messaging advanced
APM — Application Performance Monitoring PHP 7.0+
APM tools (Datadog, New Relic, Blackfire) automatically instrument applications to profile code-level performance — identifying slow DB queries, N+1 problems, and method-level bottlenecks.
2mo ago
observability intermediate
App Shell Pattern
A PWA architecture that separates the minimal UI skeleton (shell) from dynamic content — the shell is cached by the service worker and loads instantly, while content is fetched fresh on each visit.
2mo ago
mobile intermediate
Array.flat() & Array.flatMap() ES2019
Array.flat(depth) flattens nested arrays; Array.flatMap() maps then flattens one level — more efficient than map().flat() and great for expanding items.
2mo ago
javascript beginner