Intermediate terms
AI Context Management
PHP 8.0+
The practice of selecting, ordering, and trimming what goes into an LLM's context window to maximise relevance while staying under token limits.
2d ago
ai_ml intermediate
AI Fallback Routing
4
Automatically routing LLM requests to alternative models or providers when the primary fails, times out, or returns unusable output.
3w ago
ai_ml intermediate
AI Model Selection Criteria
The systematic factors engineers weigh when choosing an LLM for a task: capability, cost, latency, context window, modality, hosting, and licensing.
3w ago
ai_ml intermediate
AI Prompt Versioning
The practice of treating prompts as versioned artifacts — tracking changes, correlating outputs to prompt revisions, and enabling rollback when quality regresses.
4w ago
ai_ml intermediate
AI Synthetic Data Generation
Using generative models to produce artificial training, testing, or augmentation data that mimics the statistical properties of real datasets without exposing originals.
4w ago
ai_ml intermediate
async / await in JavaScript
ES2017
5
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.
2mo ago
javascript intermediate
API Versioning
2
Strategies for evolving an API without breaking existing consumers — URI versioning, header versioning, and content negotiation.
2mo ago
api_design intermediate
AI Guardrails
4
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.
2mo ago
ai_ml intermediate
AI Observability
1
The practice of monitoring, tracing, and evaluating LLM-powered systems in production — covering latency, token costs, prompt drift, output quality, and failure modes.
2mo ago
ai_ml intermediate
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.
3mo ago
observability intermediate
Anonymous Functions / Closures (PHP 5.3)
PHP 5.3+
1
PHP 5.3 introduced anonymous functions (closures) — function() {} expressions assignable to variables, passable as callbacks, and able to capture outer scope with use().
3mo ago
php intermediate
Apache Kafka Concepts
1
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.
3mo ago
messaging intermediate
APM — Application Performance Monitoring
PHP 7.0+
1
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.
3mo ago
observability intermediate
App Shell Pattern
3
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.
3mo ago
mobile intermediate
array_map / filter / reduce as FP Patterns
PHP 5.3+
1
PHP's array_map(), array_filter(), and array_reduce() enable functional-style data transformation pipelines — cleaner than imperative loops for many common patterns.
3mo ago
php intermediate
At-Least-Once Delivery
2
At-least-once delivery guarantees a message is delivered to at least one consumer, possibly multiple times — consumers must be idempotent to handle duplicates safely.
3mo ago
messaging intermediate
Atomic Operations
2
An atomic operation completes entirely or not at all — no intermediate state is visible to other threads. Atomic ops are the building blocks of lock-free concurrency.
3mo ago
concurrency intermediate
Atomic Operations
5
Atomic operations complete indivisibly — no other thread can observe an intermediate state. The foundation for lock-free concurrency and database counters.
3mo ago
concurrency intermediate
Attributes #[] Replacing Docblock Annotations
PHP 8.0+
PHP 8.0 native attributes (#[Route('/home')]) replace fragile DocBlock @annotations — they're syntactically valid, parseable without reflection hacks, and supported by IDEs and static analysis.
3mo ago
php intermediate
Authentication
PHP 7.0+
6
The process of verifying that a user is who they claim to be — typically by validating credentials (password, token, certificate) and establishing a session or issuing a signed token for subsequent requests.
3mo ago
security intermediate