Terms starting with "T"
Technical Writing for Developers
The craft of writing documentation, READMEs, design docs, RFCs, and comments clearly enough that another engineer can act on them without asking you — a force multiplier that most developers undertrain.
3w ago
general beginner
Type Guards & Narrowing 2.0 Type guards are expressions that narrow a union type to a more specific type at runtime — telling TypeScript exactly which branch of a union you're in.
4w ago
typescript intermediate
Timing Attacks
Side-channel attacks that infer secret values by measuring how long an operation takes — a string comparison that short-circuits on the first mismatch leaks information about the secret one character at a time.
CWE-208
4w ago
security advanced
Test Doubles PHP 8.0+
Substitute objects used in tests to replace real dependencies — mocks, stubs, spies, fakes, and dummies each serve a different purpose.
1mo ago
testing intermediate
Trie (Prefix Tree)
A tree where each node represents a character — paths from root to leaf spell out keys, enabling O(m) lookup, prefix search, and autocomplete where m is key length, independent of dataset size.
1mo ago
data_structures intermediate
TLS Certificate Lifecycle The end-to-end process of generating, validating, issuing, deploying, monitoring, and renewing a TLS certificate — and what breaks at each stage when it goes wrong.
1mo ago
cryptography intermediate
Topological Sort PHP 7.4+ An ordering of nodes in a directed acyclic graph (DAG) such that for every directed edge u→v, node u appears before v in the ordering.
1mo ago
algorithms intermediate
Type Inference PHP 7.0+
The compiler's ability to automatically deduce the type of an expression without an explicit annotation, based on context and assigned values.
1mo ago
compiler intermediate
Temperature & Sampling in LLMs
Temperature controls how random an LLM's output is — low values (0–0.3) produce predictable, conservative responses; high values (0.7–1.0) produce creative but less reliable outputs.
2mo ago
ai_ml beginner
Test-Driven Development (TDD) PHP 7.0+
A development practice where tests are written before the code they test — Red (write a failing test), Green (write the minimum code to pass), Refactor (improve without breaking tests).
2mo ago
testing intermediate
TF-IDF
Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency — a relevance scoring formula that ranks documents higher when a query term appears frequently in them but rarely across the whole collection.
2mo ago
search intermediate
Thread Safety PHP 7.0+
Thread-safe code produces correct results regardless of how multiple threads interleave — achieved through immutability, atomic operations, or synchronisation primitives.
2mo ago
concurrency intermediate
Thundering Herd Problem
Thundering herd: many processes simultaneously wake up to handle one event — all compete, one wins, the rest wasted work. Common after cache expiry or server restart.
2mo ago
concurrency intermediate
Tokenization in LLMs
The process of splitting text into tokens — subword units that LLMs process — which directly determines context window usage, cost, and model behaviour on non-English and code inputs.
2mo ago
ai_ml intermediate
Top-Level Await in Modules ES2022
ES2022 top-level await lets you use await at the module root without wrapping in async function — blocking module evaluation until the awaited Promise resolves.
2mo ago
javascript intermediate
Topics & Partitions
Kafka topics are divided into partitions — the unit of parallelism and ordering. More partitions = more parallelism; partition key determines which partition a record lands in.
2mo ago
messaging intermediate
toSorted / toReversed / with — Immutable Array Methods ES2023
JavaScript ES2023 adds immutable counterparts to mutating array methods: toSorted() returns a sorted copy, toReversed() returns a reversed copy, and with(index, value) returns a copy with one element replaced — none mutate the original array.
2mo ago
javascript beginner
Trace Sampling Strategies
Sampling records only a fraction of traces to control cost — head-based sampling decides at start, tail-based decides at end (after seeing the full trace), enabling smart error/latency capture.
2mo ago
observability intermediate
Traces & Spans PHP 7.0+
The building blocks of distributed tracing — a trace represents a complete request journey across services, composed of spans that each record one operation with its start time, duration, and parent–child relationship.
2mo ago
observability intermediate
Traits — Horizontal Reuse (PHP 5.4) PHP 5.4+
PHP 5.4 traits enable horizontal code reuse — mixins for PHP classes that can't use multiple inheritance. Use sparingly; prefer composition over trait overuse.
2mo ago
php intermediate