jargon

Subjects

Each subject opens on an ordered path of about fifty terms, with the rest of the subject under it. Work down a path and tick off what you already know; what you have ticked stays in this browser.

33 terms · every subject

Start here

The vocabulary almost every engineer meets, whatever they work on. Thirty-three terms, beginning with the ones you have already run into without knowing they had a name.

The seven subjects

1522 terms in all. Pick the one you work in — or the one you are about to.

  1. 243 terms · 12 topics

    Applied AI

    Models, tokens, retrieval, agents, evals and the production patterns around them.

  2. 223 terms · 13 topics

    Backend & systems

    Caching, consistency, queues, transactions, resilience and the rest of system design.

  3. 271 terms · 13 topics

    Frontend & browser

    Rendering, CSS, the main thread, bundling, Core Web Vitals, browser security and accessibility.

  4. 177 terms · 10 topics

    Architecture & practice

    Tradeoffs, risk, teams, delivery, estimation and incidents — the words senior engineers argue in.

  5. 203 terms · 8 topics

    Data engineering

    Pipelines, streams, warehouse modelling, file formats, data quality and what a query costs.

  6. 204 terms · 9 topics

    Platform & DevOps

    Containers, orchestration, cluster networking, infrastructure as code, delivery, recovery and the bill.

  7. 201 terms · 10 topics

    Design patterns

    Objects, SOLID, the Gang of Four catalogue, persistence and domain modelling, functional idioms and the named anti-patterns.