Intermediate terms
Text Resize and Reflow
CSS3 Ensuring content reflows into a single column and stays usable when users scale text up to 200% or zoom to 400% without horizontal scrolling.
1d ago
accessibility intermediate
Test Parallelization Gotchas
Hidden runtime hazards when tests execute concurrently — shared state, race conditions, and resource contention turn green suites red intermittently.
3w ago
testing intermediate
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.
2mo ago
typescript intermediate
Test Doubles
PHP 8.0+
2
Substitute objects used in tests to replace real dependencies — mocks, stubs, spies, fakes, and dummies each serve a different purpose.
2mo 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.
2mo 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.
3mo 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.
3mo ago
algorithms intermediate
Type Inference
PHP 7.0+
4
The compiler's ability to automatically deduce the type of an expression without an explicit annotation, based on context and assigned values.
3mo ago
compiler intermediate
Test-Driven Development (TDD)
PHP 7.0+
1
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).
3mo 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.
3mo 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.
3mo 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.
3mo ago
concurrency intermediate
Tokenization in LLMs
3
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.
3mo 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.
3mo ago
javascript intermediate
Topics & Partitions
1
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.
3mo ago
messaging intermediate
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.
3mo 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.
3mo 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.
3mo ago
php intermediate
Typeahead & Autocomplete
PHP 7.0+
1
Search suggestions shown as the user types — requiring prefix matching, typo tolerance, and sub-100ms response times to feel native, implemented via dedicated index structures or edge completion APIs.
3mo ago
search intermediate
Typed Class Constants (PHP 8.3)
PHP 8.3+
PHP 8.3 allows class, interface, and enum constants to declare an explicit type, catching type mismatches at definition time rather than at runtime when the constant is used.
3mo ago
php intermediate