Glossary
TECH GLOSSARY
474+ terms every tech contractor and business owner should know. AI, web development, SEO, mobile, cloud, and business terminology.
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A
Marketing
A/B Testing
Showing two versions of something to different audiences to see which performs better. Version A might have a blue button, Version B a green one. You split traffic 50/50 and mea...
E-commerce
Abandoned Cart Email
An automated email sent to shoppers who added items to their cart but didn't complete the purchase. These emails typically include a reminder of what was left behind, product im...
Marketing
Above the Fold
The portion of a web page visible without scrolling. Borrowed from newspaper terminology where the most important stories go above the physical fold of the paper. Your headline,...
Web
Accessibility
Making websites usable for everyone, including people with disabilities. Screen readers, keyboard navigation, color contrast—it all matters.
Mobile
Adaptive Layout
Designing interfaces that adjust to different screen sizes, orientations, and device types, like foldable phones and tablets. Unlike responsive design which just reflows content...
Marketing
Affiliate Marketing
A performance-based arrangement where you pay partners a commission for driving sales to your business. Someone promotes your product on their blog, social media, or email list....
AI
Agentic AI
AI systems designed to operate independently, making decisions, using tools, and completing multi-step tasks without constant human guidance. Unlike chatbots that just respond, ...
AI
Agentic Workflow
When AI doesn't just answer questions but actually takes actions on your behalf. Think: an AI that books your flights, sends emails, and updates your calendar without you clicki...
Business
Agile
A development approach focused on shipping small, frequent updates and adapting to feedback. The opposite of spending months building something nobody wants.
AI
AI Agent
An AI that can actually do things, not just chat. It can browse the web, run code, call APIs, and complete multi-step tasks on its own. Think AI with hands, not just a mouth.
AI
AI Alignment
Making sure AI systems actually do what humans want them to do. It's the problem of ensuring AI goals match our goals, especially as these systems get more powerful. If your GPS...
AI
AI API
A service that lets you send requests to an AI model and get responses back, usually charged per use. You don't run the model yourself, you just call their servers.
AI
AI Gateway
A single entry point that routes requests to different AI providers. It handles load balancing, fallbacks, caching, and logging so you don't have to.
AI
AI Hallucination Detection
Techniques for catching when AI makes stuff up. Methods include cross-referencing outputs against known facts, using multiple models to verify claims, and training classifiers t...
AI
AI Orchestration
Coordinating multiple AI models or agents to work together on complex tasks. It's like being a conductor - you're directing which AI does what and when.
AI
AI Safety
The practice of building AI systems that behave as intended without causing harm. Covers everything from preventing bias to making sure AI doesn't leak sensitive data.
SEO
Alt Text
A text description of an image that helps search engines understand what it shows. It also makes your site accessible to people using screen readers.
SEO
AMP
Accelerated Mobile Pages—Google's framework for making stripped-down, lightning-fast mobile pages. It was huge for a while, but most sites don't need it anymore since Core Web V...
SEO
Anchor Text
The clickable text in a hyperlink. "Click here" is bad anchor text. "Best running shoes for beginners" is good anchor text because it tells both users and search engines what th...
Mobile
Android Studio
Google's official IDE for Android development, built on JetBrains' IntelliJ platform. It includes an emulator, layout editor, profiling tools, and built-in support for Kotlin an...
Business
Annual Contract Value (ACV)
The average annual revenue per contract. If one customer pays $120K/year and another pays $60K/year, your average ACV is $90K. Enterprise SaaS companies obsess over ACV because ...
Web
API
A set of rules that lets different software talk to each other. It's how your app asks another service for data or tells it to do something.
Security
API Key
A unique identifier used to authenticate requests to an API. It's like a password for your application. Never expose API keys in client-side code or public repositories. Rotate ...
Mobile
App Bundle
A publishing format (used by Google Play and now Apple) that lets the store generate optimized APKs for each device. Users download only what they need.
Mobile
App Clip (iOS)
A small part of an iOS app that users can access instantly without downloading the full app. Scan a QR code at a restaurant and the ordering interface appears immediately, no Ap...
Mobile
App Links
Android's equivalent of Apple's Universal Links. They let you claim ownership of web URLs so they open in your app automatically. When a user taps a link to your domain, Android...
Mobile
App Signing
A security process that cryptographically proves your app comes from you and hasn't been tampered with. Both Apple and Google require it.
Mobile
App Store Optimization
SEO for app stores. Optimizing your app's title, description, screenshots, and reviews to rank higher in App Store and Google Play searches.
Business
ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue)
MRR multiplied by 12. If your MRR is $50,000, your ARR is $600,000. It's the standard way SaaS companies describe their size. "$1M ARR" is a common milestone that means you've f...
Web
Astro
A web framework built for content-heavy sites like blogs, marketing pages, and documentation. It ships zero JavaScript by default and lets you use components from React, Vue, or...
AI
Attention Mechanism
The core idea behind transformers that lets AI focus on the most relevant parts of the input when generating output. It's like how you skim a page and your eyes jump to the impo...
Analytics
Attribution Model
A rule for deciding which marketing touchpoint gets credit for a conversion. Did the customer convert because of the Google ad they clicked first, the email they opened second, ...
Web
Authentication
Proving who you are. It's the login process where you show your credentials like email and password to verify your identity.
Web
Authorization
Deciding what you can do after you've logged in. Authentication asks who are you, authorization asks what are you allowed to access.
Cloud
Auto-scaling
Automatically adding or removing servers based on demand. You handle traffic spikes without overpaying during quiet periods.
AI
Autonomous Vehicle
A car or truck that drives itself using AI, sensors, cameras, and lidar. Levels range from 1 (cruise control) to 5 (no steering wheel needed). Most "self-driving" cars today are...
E-commerce
Average Order Value (AOV)
The average amount a customer spends per order. Calculate it by dividing total revenue by number of orders. If you made $10,000 from 200 orders, your AOV is $50. Increasing AOV ...
Cloud
AWS (Amazon Web Services)
The largest cloud computing platform, offering over 200 services from virtual servers to machine learning. About a third of all cloud infrastructure runs on AWS. It's incredibly...
B
Web
Backend
The server-side code that handles data, business logic, and database operations. Users never see it directly, but it powers everything behind the scenes.
SEO
Backlinks
Links from other websites pointing to yours. Google sees these as votes of confidence—the more quality sites linking to you, the more trustworthy you appear to search engines.
Business
Backlog
A prioritized list of everything that needs to be built. The top items get worked on next. Things at the bottom might never get done—and that's okay.
AI
Batch Processing
Sending a bunch of AI requests at once and getting all the results back together, instead of one at a time. It's usually cheaper but slower since you're waiting for the whole ba...
AI
Benchmark (AI)
A standardized test to measure how well an AI model performs. It's how we compare apples to apples when evaluating different models.
Mobile
Biometric Authentication
Using fingerprints, face recognition, or iris scanning to verify identity on mobile devices. Face ID and Touch ID on iPhones, fingerprint sensors on Android. More secure and con...
Web
Blockchain
A distributed ledger where transactions are grouped into blocks and chained together cryptographically. Every participant has a copy, and changing historical records is practica...
Cloud
Blue-Green Deployment
Running two identical production environments where one serves live traffic while the other gets updates. When the new version is ready, you flip traffic instantly—zero downtime.
Business
Bootstrapping
Building a business with your own money and revenue instead of taking outside investment. You grow slower but keep 100% ownership and full control. Basecamp, Mailchimp (before a...
Analytics
Bounce Rate
The percentage of visitors who leave your site after viewing only one page. If 100 people visit and 60 leave without clicking anything else, your bounce rate is 60%. High bounce...
Marketing
Brand Awareness
How familiar people are with your business. When someone needs a plumber and your name is the first one that pops into their head, that's brand awareness working. It's hard to m...
Web
Browser API
Built-in features that browsers provide to JavaScript, like accessing the camera, reading device sensors, storing data locally, or sending notifications. They're how web apps ge...
Web
Bun
An all-in-one JavaScript runtime, bundler, and package manager that's significantly faster than Node.js. It runs TypeScript natively without compilation, installs npm packages i...
Web
Bundle Size
The total size of your JavaScript after it's been packaged for production. Smaller bundles mean faster load times for users.
Business
Burn Rate
How fast a startup spends its cash reserves, usually measured monthly. If you have $1M in the bank and spend $100K/month, your burn rate is $100K and you have 10 months of runwa...
C
Business
CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost)
How much you spend to get one new customer, including ads, sales, and marketing costs. If you spend $10,000 on marketing and get 100 customers, your CAC is $100. The goal is to ...
Business
CAC Payback Period
How many months it takes to earn back what you spent acquiring a customer. If your CAC is $300 and customers pay $100/month with 70% margin, payback is about 4.3 months. Under 1...
Web
Caching
Storing frequently used data closer to where it's needed so you don't have to fetch it every time. Makes everything faster.
Marketing
Call to Action (CTA)
The specific action you want someone to take on your page. "Get a Free Quote," "Book a Consultation," "Start Your Trial." A good CTA is specific about what happens next, uses ac...
Cloud
Canary Release
Rolling out changes to a small percentage of users first before going fully live. If something breaks, only a few people are affected instead of everyone.
SEO
Canonical URL
The "official" version of a page when you have duplicate or similar content at multiple URLs. It tells Google which one to index and rank, preventing duplicate content issues.
Mobile
Capacitor
A cross-platform runtime by the Ionic team that turns web apps into native mobile apps. You build with standard web tech (HTML, CSS, JS), and Capacitor wraps it in a native shel...
Web
CDN
A network of servers around the world that stores copies of your files. Users download from the nearest server instead of your origin.
AI
Chain of Thought
Getting an AI to reason step-by-step through a problem instead of jumping straight to an answer. It dramatically improves accuracy on complex tasks like math and logic.
Business
Change Request
A formal ask to modify something after we've already agreed on the scope. Not a bad thing - projects evolve. But it usually affects timeline and budget.
Cloud
Chaos Engineering
Intentionally breaking things in production to test how resilient your system is. Netflix pioneered this with their "Chaos Monkey" that randomly kills servers. If your system ca...
AI
Chatbot
An AI program that talks with users through text or voice. Modern chatbots use LLMs to have actual conversations instead of just matching keywords to canned responses.
E-commerce
Checkout Optimization
Reducing friction in the buying process to prevent cart abandonment. Best practices include guest checkout (don't force account creation), minimal form fields, multiple payment ...
Marketing
Churn Rate
The percentage of customers who stop doing business with you over a given period. If you start the month with 100 customers and lose 5, your monthly churn rate is 5%. High churn...
Cloud
CI/CD
Short for Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment. It automates testing and deploying your code so you can ship faster with fewer bugs.
Marketing
Click-Through Rate (CTR)
The percentage of people who click on your link, ad, or email after seeing it. If 100 people see your ad and 3 click it, your CTR is 3%. Higher CTR means your message resonates ...
Cloud
Cloud Computing
Renting computing resources like servers, storage, and databases from a provider instead of owning them. You pay for what you use, scale up or down instantly, and let someone el...
SEO
CLS - Cumulative Layout Shift
Measures how much stuff jumps around while your page loads. You know when you're about to tap a button and an ad loads, pushing everything down? That's layout shift.
Web
Code Splitting
Breaking your JavaScript into smaller chunks that load on demand. Users only download the code they actually need for the page they're on.
Analytics
Cohort Analysis
Grouping users by a shared characteristic (like signup date) and tracking their behavior over time. Instead of looking at all users as one blob, you see how January signups beha...
AI
Collaborative Filtering
A recommendation technique that finds users similar to you and suggests things they liked. If people who watched the same 10 movies as you also loved movie #11, you'll probably ...
Web
Component
A reusable piece of UI—like a button, card, or navigation bar. You build it once and use it everywhere, keeping your code consistent and maintainable.
AI
Computer Vision
AI that can see and understand images and video. It lets machines identify objects, read text from photos, detect faces, and understand what's happening in a scene.
Cloud
Container
A lightweight, isolated package containing your app and its dependencies. Like a VM but way faster and smaller because it shares the host OS.
Cloud
Container Registry
A storage service for Docker container images. You push built images there and pull them when deploying. Docker Hub is the public default, but most companies use private registr...
SEO
Content Cluster
An SEO strategy where you create a main "pillar" page on a broad topic, surrounded by detailed "cluster" pages on related subtopics, all linked together. It shows search engines...
Marketing
Content Marketing
Attracting customers by creating useful content instead of directly advertising to them. Blog posts, videos, podcasts, guides, infographics. The idea is that if you consistently...
Security
Content Security Policy (CSP)
HTTP headers that tell browsers which resources your page is allowed to load. It prevents XSS attacks by blocking unauthorized scripts from running. If a script isn't on your ap...
AI
Context Window
How much text an AI can "see" at once—its working memory. Bigger windows mean you can feed it longer documents, but they cost more and can slow things down.
Cloud
Continuous Deployment
Automatically deploying code to production after it passes all tests. No manual "deploy" button—if tests pass, it ships.
Cloud
Continuous Integration
The practice of automatically building and testing code every time someone pushes changes. Catches problems early instead of at release time.
Marketing
Conversion Funnel
The specific sequence of steps a visitor takes to become a customer on your website. Views ad, clicks through, lands on page, reads content, fills out form, becomes lead, gets f...
Analytics
Conversion Rate
The percentage of visitors who complete a desired action. If 1,000 people visit your page and 30 fill out your form, your conversion rate is 3%. This is arguably the most import...
E-commerce
Conversion Rate Optimization (E-commerce)
Improving your online store to get more visitors to buy. Specifically for e-commerce, this means optimizing product pages, simplifying checkout, adding trust signals, improving ...
Analytics
Conversion Tracking
The process of recording when a website visitor completes a valuable action. Form submissions, purchases, phone calls, chat initiations. Without conversion tracking, you know ho...
Analytics
Core Web Vitals
Three specific metrics Google uses to measure user experience: Largest Contentful Paint (loading speed), Interaction to Next Paint (interactivity), and Cumulative Layout Shift (...
Web
CORS
A security rule that controls which websites can make requests to your server. It prevents random sites from accessing your API on behalf of users.
Marketing
Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)
How much you spend to get one new customer. Calculate it by dividing total marketing spend by the number of new customers gained. If you spent $1,000 on ads and got 10 customers...
Marketing
Cost Per Click (CPC)
How much you pay each time someone clicks your ad. In Google Ads, you bid on keywords and pay when someone clicks. CPCs range from $0.50 for low-competition keywords to $50+ for...
AI
Cost per Token
What you pay for each chunk of text the AI processes. Tokens are roughly 4 characters or 3/4 of a word. Input and output tokens usually have different prices.
Marketing
CPM (Cost Per Mille)
The cost of 1,000 ad impressions. If you pay $5 CPM, you're paying $5 for your ad to be shown 1,000 times. This pricing model is common on social media and display advertising. ...
Mobile
Crash Reporting
Automatically collecting and reporting app crashes with stack traces, device info, and reproduction steps. Sentry and Firebase Crashlytics catch crashes in real-time so you can ...
SEO
Crawl Budget
The number of pages Google will crawl on your site within a given timeframe. Big sites need to worry about this—if Google can't crawl your important pages, they won't get indexed.
Mobile
Cross-platform
Building one app that runs on both iOS and Android. Saves time and money compared to building two separate native apps.
E-commerce
Cross-Selling
Recommending related products alongside what a customer is buying. "People who bought this also bought..." or "Complete the look with these accessories." Amazon generates about ...
Web
CSR - Client Side Rendering
The browser downloads a minimal HTML shell, then JavaScript builds the page. Fast subsequent navigations, but users might see a loading spinner on first visit.
Security
CSRF (Cross-Site Request Forgery)
An attack that tricks your browser into making unwanted requests to a site where you're logged in. You visit a malicious page, and it secretly submits a form to your bank's site...
Web
CSS-in-JS
Writing CSS styles directly in your JavaScript files instead of separate .css files. Libraries like styled-components and Emotion make this work. It keeps styles scoped to compo...
E-commerce
Customer Acquisition (E-commerce)
The strategies and costs involved in getting new customers to your online store. For e-commerce, the main channels are paid ads (Google Shopping, Meta), SEO and content marketin...
Analytics
Customer Acquisition Cost
The total cost of acquiring a new customer, including all marketing and sales expenses divided by the number of new customers. If you spend $10,000 on marketing and sales in a m...
Marketing
Customer Journey
The complete experience a customer has with your business, from first discovering you to making a purchase and beyond. Mapping this journey reveals touchpoints where customers i...
Marketing
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
The total revenue you can expect from a single customer over their entire relationship with your business. If a customer spends $50/month and stays for 2 years, their CLV is $1,...
E-commerce
Customer Reviews (E-commerce)
Product ratings and written feedback from buyers displayed on product pages. Reviews dramatically impact purchase decisions. Products with reviews convert at nearly 4x the rate ...
Security
CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures)
A public catalog of known security vulnerabilities, each with a unique ID. When a bug is found in software, it gets a CVE number like CVE-2024-1234 so everyone's talking about t...
D
Web
dApps (Decentralized Applications)
Applications that run on a blockchain network instead of centralized servers. No single company controls them, and they can't be shut down by any one authority. Uniswap (decentr...
Analytics
Dashboard
A visual display of your most important metrics in one place. Instead of digging through multiple reports, a dashboard puts your key numbers front and center. Good dashboards sh...
AI
Data Labeling
The process of tagging data with the correct answers so AI can learn from it. Someone has to look at 100,000 photos and mark which ones contain cats before the model can learn t...
Analytics
Data-Driven Decision Making
Making business choices based on data rather than gut feeling. Instead of redesigning your homepage because you're bored of it, you redesign it because data shows a 70% bounce r...
Web
Database
Where your app stores all its data—user accounts, posts, orders, everything. Think of it as a really organized spreadsheet that code can read and write to.
Security
DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service)
An attack that floods your server with so much traffic it can't serve real users. Thousands of compromised machines (a botnet) all hit your site simultaneously. It's like a flas...
AI
Deep Learning
Machine learning using neural networks with many layers (hence "deep"). More layers can learn more complex patterns. This is what powers image recognition, language models, and ...
Mobile
Deep Linking
Links that open a specific screen inside your app instead of just the home screen. Essential for marketing campaigns and user experience.
AI
Deepfake
AI-generated fake media, usually video or audio, that makes it look like someone said or did something they didn't. The technology can swap faces in videos, clone voices from a ...
Business
Deliverable
A tangible thing we hand over to you - could be code, designs, documentation, or a working feature. Something you can actually see and verify.
Web
Deno
A JavaScript runtime created by the same person who made Node.js, built to fix Node's design mistakes. It supports TypeScript natively, has built-in security permissions, and us...
Cloud
DevOps
A culture and set of practices that bridges development and operations. The goal is faster, more reliable releases through automation and collaboration.
AI
Diffusion Model
The AI architecture behind image generators like Stable Diffusion and DALL-E. It works by learning to remove noise from images, then generating new images by starting with pure ...
Cloud
Disaster Recovery
Your plan for getting back online when things go catastrophically wrong. Covers backups, failover systems, and how fast you can recover.
SEO
Disavow Links
Telling Google to ignore specific backlinks pointing to your site. If spammy or toxic sites link to you and you can't get them removed, you submit a disavow file through Google ...
Business
Discovery Phase
The research and planning period before actual development starts. This is where we figure out what you actually need, not just what you think you need.
Cloud
Distributed Tracing
Tracking a single request as it flows through multiple microservices. When a user hits your app, the request might touch 10 different services. Distributed tracing connects all ...
Web
DNS
The internet's phone book. It translates human-friendly domain names into the IP addresses computers actually use.
Cloud
Docker
The most popular tool for creating containers. It packages your app with everything it needs to run, so it works the same everywhere.
Web
Domain
Your website's address on the internet. It's the name people type to find you, like example.com.
SEO
Domain Authority
A score (1-100) that predicts how well your entire website will rank in search results. It's based on factors like backlinks, age, and overall trustworthiness. Higher is better.
SEO
Domain Rating
Ahrefs' proprietary score (0-100) measuring the strength of a website's backlink profile. It's similar to Moz's Domain Authority but uses a different calculation. Higher ratings...
AI
DPO (Direct Preference Optimization)
A simpler alternative to RLHF for aligning AI models with human preferences. Instead of training a separate reward model, it directly optimizes the language model using pairs of...
Marketing
Drip Campaign
A series of automated emails sent over time to nurture leads. Someone downloads your guide, then gets Email 1 the next day, Email 2 three days later, and so on. Each email build...
Web
Drizzle ORM
A lightweight TypeScript ORM that stays close to SQL instead of abstracting it away. Developers who like writing SQL but want type safety gravitate toward Drizzle. It's thinner ...
E-commerce
Dropshipping
An e-commerce model where you sell products you don't physically stock. When a customer orders, you forward the order to a supplier who ships directly to the customer. You never...
SEO
Dwell Time
How long someone stays on your page after clicking from search results before going back to Google. Longer dwell time suggests your content was useful. If people click back in 5...
E
SEO
E-E-A-T
Google's quality guidelines: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. It's how Google decides if your content is actually worth ranking—do you know what yo...
Web
Edge Computing
Processing data closer to where users are instead of sending everything to a central server. Your code runs at data centers scattered around the world, so a user in Tokyo gets s...
Web
Edge Functions
Code that runs at CDN locations close to your users instead of one central server. Lower latency because the response doesn't have to travel across the world.
Marketing
Email Marketing
Using email to communicate with potential and existing customers. Newsletters, promotional offers, product updates, drip campaigns. It consistently delivers the highest ROI of a...
AI
Embeddings
A way to turn words, sentences, or documents into numbers that capture their meaning. Similar concepts get similar numbers, which lets AI find related content even if the exact ...
Security
Encryption
Scrambling data so only authorized parties can read it. Without the decryption key, the data looks like random gibberish. It protects everything from your WhatsApp messages to y...
Security
End-to-End Encryption (E2EE)
Encryption where only the sender and receiver can read the messages. Not even the service provider can decrypt them. WhatsApp and Signal use E2EE, meaning even if their servers ...
Analytics
Engagement Rate
In GA4, the percentage of sessions that qualify as "engaged." A session counts as engaged if it lasts longer than 10 seconds, has a conversion event, or includes 2+ pageviews. I...
Analytics
Event Tracking
Recording specific interactions visitors have with your website beyond pageviews. Button clicks, form submissions, video plays, file downloads, scroll milestones. GA4 is entirel...
Cloud
Event-Driven Architecture
A design pattern where services react to events instead of directly calling each other. When a user signs up, an "UserCreated" event fires, and the email service, analytics serv...
Analytics
Exit Rate
The percentage of views on a page that were the last in the session. Different from bounce rate because it includes people who visited other pages first. A high exit rate on you...
Business
Expansion Revenue
Additional revenue from existing customers through upgrades, upsells, or add-ons. It's cheaper to grow revenue from happy customers than to find new ones. If your expansion reve...
AI
Explainable AI (XAI)
AI systems that can explain why they made a specific decision. Most AI is a black box. If your loan gets denied by AI, explainable AI can tell you it was because of your credit ...
Mobile
Expo
A toolkit that makes React Native development way easier. Handles the annoying native stuff so you can focus on building features instead of fighting Xcode.
F
Cloud
Feature Flag
A switch in your code that lets you turn features on or off without deploying new code. Super useful for testing features with specific users or killing a broken feature instantly.
SEO
Featured Snippet
The answer box at the top of Google that directly answers a question. It's position zero—above all other results. Landing here can massively boost your traffic.
AI
Federated Learning
Training AI across multiple devices or organizations without sharing the actual data. Each participant trains locally and only sends model updates, not raw data. It's how your p...
AI
Few-shot Learning
Giving an AI a few examples of what you want before asking it to do the task. Those examples teach it the pattern without needing to retrain the whole model.
SEO
FID - First Input Delay
The time between when a user first clicks something and when the browser actually responds. If your site feels frozen when people try to interact, your FID is bad.
AI
Fine-tuning
Teaching an existing AI model new tricks by training it on your specific data. It's like hiring someone with general skills, then training them on how your company does things.
Security
Firewall
A security system that monitors and controls network traffic based on rules you set. It's the bouncer at the door, deciding which connections get in and which get blocked. Can b...
Business
Fixed-price Contract
A contract where the total cost is agreed upfront for a defined scope. You know exactly what you'll pay, but changes outside the original scope cost extra.
Mobile
Flutter
Google's cross-platform framework using the Dart language. Known for smooth animations and a single codebase that works on mobile, web, and desktop.
AI
Foundation Model
A massive AI model trained on huge datasets that can be adapted for many different tasks. Think of it as the base layer that other applications build on top of.
Business
Freemium
A pricing model where the basic product is free and you charge for premium features. Spotify, Dropbox, and Slack all use freemium. The free tier gets users in the door, and the ...
Web
Frontend
The part of a website users actually see and interact with—buttons, forms, animations, everything in the browser. It's built with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
E-commerce
Fulfillment
The entire process from receiving an order to delivering it to the customer. Picking, packing, shipping, and tracking. You can handle fulfillment yourself (self-fulfillment), us...
Web
Full Stack
A developer who works on both frontend and backend. They can build an entire application from the database to the user interface.
AI
Function Calling
When an AI can decide to call specific functions or tools you've defined, returning structured data instead of just text. It's how you connect AI to real actions and data.
Business
Fundraising
Raising money from investors to fund your startup. Rounds go from pre-seed ($100K-$1M) through Series A, B, C and beyond. You give up equity in exchange for capital. Each round ...
Analytics
Funnel Visualization
A chart showing how many users progress through each step of a process on your website. If 1,000 people view your product page, 500 click "add to cart," 200 start checkout, and ...
G
AI
GAN (Generative Adversarial Network)
Two neural networks competing against each other. One generates fake content, the other tries to detect it's fake. They keep pushing each other to improve until the generator cr...
AI
Generative AI
AI that creates new content like text, images, music, code, or video. Unlike traditional AI that classifies or predicts, generative AI produces original output. ChatGPT writing ...
Mobile
Gesture Navigation
Touch-based interactions like swipe, pinch, long press, and pull-to-refresh that feel natural on mobile devices. Well-implemented gestures make apps feel fluid and intuitive. Ba...
AI
GGUF
A popular file format for storing quantized AI models that can run on regular consumer hardware. If you want to run an LLM on your laptop without a fancy GPU, you're probably do...
Cloud
GitOps
Using Git as the single source of truth for infrastructure and deployment. Every change goes through a pull request, and automated tools sync the Git state to your actual server...
Business
Go-live
The moment your software becomes available to real users. Launch day. Everything before this was prep - now it's real.
Analytics
Goal (GA4 Conversion)
A specific user action you track as valuable in Google Analytics. Form submissions, phone calls, purchases, video plays, file downloads. In GA4, these are called "conversion eve...
Analytics
Google Analytics 4 (GA4)
The current version of Google's free web analytics platform. It replaced Universal Analytics in 2023 with an event-based tracking model. GA4 tracks users across devices, integra...
Analytics
Google Search Console
A free Google tool that shows how your site appears in search results. Which queries bring up your pages, your average ranking position, click-through rates, and technical issue...
E-commerce
Google Shopping
Google's product search and advertising platform. When someone searches for a product, Shopping ads show product images, prices, and store names directly in search results. You ...
AI
GPT
Generative Pre-trained Transformer—OpenAI's family of language models. "Generative" means it creates content, "Pre-trained" means it learned from existing data, "Transformer" is...
Web
GraphQL
An alternative to REST that lets you ask for exactly the data you need in a single request. No more getting too much or too little data.
AI
Guardrails (AI)
Safety measures that keep AI from going off the rails - blocking harmful outputs, enforcing topic boundaries, and catching prompt injection attempts before they cause problems.
Marketing
Guerrilla Marketing
Unconventional marketing tactics that get attention without big budgets. Flash mobs, street art, viral stunts, creative giveaways. The idea is to create memorable experiences th...
H
AI
Hallucination
When AI confidently makes stuff up. It'll invent facts, cite fake sources, or describe things that don't exist—all while sounding completely sure of itself. This is why you veri...
E-commerce
Headless Commerce
An e-commerce architecture where the front-end (what customers see) is completely separate from the back-end (product management, checkout, inventory). This lets you build any f...
Analytics
Heatmap
A visual representation of where visitors click, move their mouse, and scroll on your page. Hot spots (usually red) show heavy activity. Cold spots (blue) show areas nobody inte...
SEO
Heatmaps
Visual overlays showing where users click, scroll, and move their cursor on your pages. Hot spots (red/orange) show high activity, cold spots (blue) show ignored areas. They rev...
Cloud
Helm Charts
Pre-packaged Kubernetes application definitions that make deploying complex apps as easy as running one command. Instead of writing dozens of Kubernetes config files, you instal...
Web
Hooks
React functions that let you use state and other features in functional components. useState, useEffect, useContext—they all start with "use."
Cloud
Horizontal Scaling
Adding more servers to handle increased load instead of making existing servers bigger. It's like opening more checkout lanes instead of making one cashier work faster. Most clo...
Web
Hosting
The service that stores your website files and makes them accessible on the internet. No hosting means nobody can visit your site.
Mobile
Hot Reload
A development feature that lets you see code changes instantly without restarting the app. Saves tons of time during UI work.
SEO
Hreflang Tags
HTML tags that tell search engines which language and regional version of a page to show to different users. If you have English, Spanish, and French versions of your site, href...
Web
HTTPS
HTTP with encryption. The S means your connection is secure and nobody can eavesdrop on what you're sending or receiving.
Mobile
Hybrid App
An app that's basically a website wrapped in a native container. One codebase works on both platforms, but performance isn't as good as native.
Web
Hydration
When server-rendered HTML gets "activated" by JavaScript in the browser. The page looks ready instantly, then becomes interactive once the JS loads and attaches event listeners.
I
AI
Image Classification
AI that looks at an image and assigns it to a category. Is this a cat or a dog? Is this X-ray normal or abnormal? It's one of the oldest and most reliable computer vision tasks,...
Cloud
Immutable Infrastructure
Instead of updating servers in place, you build entirely new ones with the changes baked in and replace the old ones. Servers are treated like cattle, not pets. No one SSHs in t...
Marketing
Impression
One instance of your content being displayed to someone. If your ad shows up in 1,000 feeds, that's 1,000 impressions. Impressions don't mean people saw or engaged with your con...
Mobile
In-app Purchase
Buying stuff inside an app—subscriptions, extra features, virtual goods. Apple and Google take a 15-30% cut of every transaction.
SEO
Indexing
When Google adds your page to its database so it can show up in search results. If a page isn't indexed, it basically doesn't exist as far as Google is concerned.
AI
Inference
When AI actually runs and generates output. Training teaches the model; inference is when it does its job. This is what you're paying for with API calls.
Marketing
Influencer Marketing
Partnering with people who have engaged audiences to promote your product or service. Doesn't have to mean paying celebrities millions. Micro-influencers with 5,000 to 50,000 fo...
AI
Information Extraction
AI that pulls structured data from unstructured text. Give it a contract and it extracts dates, parties, dollar amounts, and key terms. Give it a resume and it pulls out skills,...
Cloud
Infrastructure as Code
Managing servers, databases, and networks through config files instead of clicking around dashboards. Version controlled, repeatable, and way less error-prone.
Mobile
Instant App (Android)
Android's equivalent of App Clips. Users can run parts of your app from a link without installing it. Great for try-before-you-install experiences and reducing friction for firs...
SEO
Internal Linking
Links between pages on your own website. They help search engines understand your site structure, distribute page authority, and guide users to related content. Most sites under...
SEO
International SEO
Optimizing your website to rank in multiple countries and languages. It involves hreflang tags, country-specific domains or subfolders, localized content, and understanding how ...
E-commerce
Inventory Management
Tracking what products you have in stock, what's running low, and what needs reordering. For e-commerce, this also means syncing inventory across sales channels (your website, A...
Mobile
Ionic
A UI framework for building cross-platform mobile apps using web technologies. It provides a library of mobile-optimized components that look native on both iOS and Android. Pai...
Web
IPFS (InterPlanetary File System)
A peer-to-peer network for storing and sharing files in a distributed way. Instead of downloading from one server, you grab pieces from multiple nodes. Content is addressed by w...
Web
ISR - Incremental Static Regeneration
The best of both worlds - pages are static but can rebuild themselves in the background when data changes. You get static speed with dynamic freshness.
J
Web
JavaScript
The programming language of the web. Every browser runs it, and it's grown from a simple scripting tool to powering full applications on both the frontend and backend (via Node....
Mobile
Jetpack Compose
Android's modern UI toolkit that uses a declarative approach to building interfaces in Kotlin. It's Google's answer to SwiftUI. Instead of XML layouts, you write Kotlin function...
Web
JWT
A compact, self-contained token that carries user info and permissions. The server doesn't need to store session data because everything's in the token.
K
Business
Kanban
A visual workflow system using columns like "To Do," "In Progress," and "Done." Work flows continuously without fixed sprints. Great for teams with ongoing tasks.
SEO
Keyword Cannibalization
When multiple pages on your site compete for the same keyword, confusing search engines about which one to rank. Instead of one strong page, you end up with two weak ones splitt...
SEO
Keyword Difficulty
A score estimating how hard it'll be to rank on page one for a specific keyword. Higher difficulty means more authoritative sites are competing. New sites should target low-diff...
SEO
Keywords
The words and phrases people type into search engines when they're looking for something. Your job is to figure out which ones your audience uses and make sure your content show...
AI
Knowledge Distillation
Training a smaller "student" model to replicate the behavior of a larger "teacher" model. The student doesn't just learn from data, it learns from how the teacher responds to da...
SEO
Knowledge Panel
The info box Google shows on the right side of search results for well-known entities like companies, people, and places. It pulls data from various sources including Wikipedia,...
Mobile
Kotlin
Google's preferred language for Android development. It's more concise and safer than Java, with features like null safety and coroutines built in. Google declared it the offici...
Analytics
KPI (Key Performance Indicator)
A measurable value that shows whether you're achieving a business objective. For a website, KPIs might include monthly organic traffic, conversion rate, cost per lead, and reven...
Cloud
Kubernetes
An orchestration platform that manages containers at scale. It handles deployment, scaling, and recovery automatically. Often called K8s.
L
Cloud
Lambda
AWS's serverless computing service that runs your code in response to events without provisioning servers. You upload a function, set a trigger (like an API call or file upload)...
Marketing
Landing Page
A standalone web page created for a specific marketing campaign. Unlike your homepage (which tries to serve everyone), a landing page has one goal and removes all distractions. ...
AI
Latency (AI)
How long you wait between sending a request and getting the first response back. Lower latency means snappier interactions. Users notice anything over 200ms.
Web
Lazy Loading
Loading content only when it's needed—like images that load as you scroll to them, or code that loads when you navigate to a page.
SEO
LCP - Largest Contentful Paint
How long it takes for the biggest visible element on your page to load—usually a hero image or headline. Google wants this under 2.5 seconds.
Marketing
Lead Magnet
A free resource you offer in exchange for someone's email address. Could be an ebook, checklist, template, or free tool. The idea is simple: give something valuable away to star...
Marketing
Lead Nurturing
The process of building relationships with potential customers who aren't ready to buy yet. Through email sequences, helpful content, and timely follow-ups, you stay top of mind...
Business
Licensing
The legal terms that define how software can be used, distributed, or modified. Read the fine print - some "free" tools have strict commercial restrictions.
SEO
Link Building
The practice of getting other websites to link to yours to improve search rankings. Quality matters more than quantity. One link from the New York Times is worth more than 1,000...
AI
LLM (Large Language Model)
The AI brain behind ChatGPT and similar tools. It's a massive program trained on tons of text that can understand and generate human-like writing. Think of it as autocomplete on...
Cloud
Load Balancer
A system that distributes incoming traffic across multiple servers. Prevents any single server from getting overwhelmed and improves reliability.
SEO
Log File Analysis
Studying your server logs to see exactly which pages Googlebot crawls, how often, and what responses it gets. It's the most accurate way to understand how Google interacts with ...
Cloud
Logging
Recording events and data from your application as text entries. Good logs tell you what happened, when, and why. They're your forensic evidence when things go wrong. Structured...
SEO
Long-tail Keywords
Longer, more specific search phrases that fewer people search for but are way easier to rank for. They usually convert better because the searcher knows exactly what they want.
AI
LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation)
A lightweight fine-tuning technique that trains only a tiny fraction of a model's parameters instead of the whole thing. You can customize a massive model on a single GPU that w...
Business
LTV (Lifetime Value)
The total revenue you expect from a single customer over their entire relationship with you. If customers pay $100/month and stay 2 years on average, LTV is $2,400. The golden r...
M
AI
Machine Learning
Teaching computers to learn patterns from data instead of programming explicit rules. You show it examples, it figures out the patterns. The umbrella term for most modern AI.
Business
Maintenance Mode
The ongoing support phase after launch. Bug fixes, security updates, small improvements. Your software doesn't end at launch - it needs care.
Marketing
Marketing Automation
Using software to automate repetitive marketing tasks. Email sequences that send automatically based on triggers. Social media posts that schedule themselves. Lead scoring that ...
Marketing
Marketing Funnel
The journey someone takes from discovering your business to becoming a customer. Usually described as stages: awareness (they learn you exist), consideration (they evaluate you ...
Marketing
Marketing Pixel
A tiny piece of code you put on your website that tracks visitor behavior and sends data back to ad platforms. The Meta Pixel tells Facebook who visited your site so you can ret...
E-commerce
Marketplace
A platform where multiple sellers list products for customers to buy. Amazon, Etsy, and eBay are the biggest examples. Selling on marketplaces gives you access to their existing...
AI
MCP (Model Context Protocol)
A standard way to connect AI models to external tools and data sources. It's like USB for AI—a universal plug that lets different systems talk to each other.
Cloud
Message Queue
A system where services drop messages into a queue and other services pick them up asynchronously. It decouples your services so a slow email sender doesn't block your fast paym...
SEO
Meta Description
The short summary that appears under your title in search results. It doesn't directly affect rankings, but a good one can dramatically improve your click-through rate.
SEO
Meta Tags
HTML snippets that give search engines info about your page. They don't show up on the page itself but help with SEO and control how your page appears in search results.
Cloud
Microservices
An architecture where your app is split into small, independent services that communicate over APIs. Easier to scale and update individual pieces.
Web
Migration
A file that describes a change to your database structure—like adding a new column or creating a table. Migrations let you version control your database.
Business
Milestone
A major checkpoint in the project timeline. Usually tied to payments and deliverables. Hit the milestone, get paid, move to the next phase.
AI
Mixture of Experts (MoE)
An architecture where a model has multiple specialized "expert" sub-networks and a router that picks which ones to activate for each input. Only a fraction of the model runs at ...
Mobile
Mobile Analytics
Tracking how users interact with your app, including screen views, button taps, crashes, and session duration. Firebase Analytics and Mixpanel are the go-to tools. Without analy...
Web
Mobile-first
Designing for phones first, then adding complexity for larger screens. Since most users are on mobile, you start with the smallest screen and scale up.
SEO
Mobile-friendly
A site that works well on phones—readable text, tappable buttons, no horizontal scrolling. Google uses mobile-first indexing, so if your mobile experience sucks, your rankings w...
Business
Mockup
A high-fidelity visual design showing exactly how the final product will look. Unlike wireframes, mockups include colors, typography, and real content.
AI
Model Card
Documentation that describes an AI model's capabilities, limitations, training data, and intended use cases. It's like a nutrition label for AI, helping developers understand wh...
AI
Model Distillation
Training a smaller, faster model to mimic a larger model's outputs. You get most of the performance at a fraction of the cost and speed.
AI
Model Serving
Running an AI model on a server so applications can send it requests and get predictions back. It's the infrastructure that makes AI actually usable in production.
Cloud
Monitoring
Tracking your app's health, performance, and errors in real-time. You can't fix what you can't see—monitoring tells you when things break before users complain.
Cloud
Monolith
A traditional architecture where the entire app is one big codebase and deployment unit. Simpler to start with, harder to scale later.
Web
Monorepo
Keeping multiple related projects in a single Git repository instead of separate repos. Your frontend, backend, and shared libraries all live together, making cross-project chan...
Web
MPA - Multi Page Application
The traditional web model where each page is a separate HTML document. Click a link, server sends a new page. Simple, reliable, and SEO-friendly out of the box.
E-commerce
MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue)
The predictable revenue your business earns every month from active subscriptions. If you have 100 customers paying $50/month, your MRR is $5,000. MRR is the most important metr...
Business
MSA - Master Service Agreement
The umbrella contract that covers the general terms of our working relationship. Individual projects get their own SOWs under this agreement.
E-commerce
Multi-Channel Selling
Selling products across multiple platforms simultaneously: your own website, Amazon, eBay, Instagram Shop, retail stores. Each channel reaches different customers. The challenge...
Cloud
Multi-Cloud
Using multiple cloud providers (like AWS plus Google Cloud) to avoid vendor lock-in or meet specific requirements. The theory is great but the practice is complicated. Most comp...
AI
Multimodal AI
AI that can work with multiple types of input like text, images, audio, and video all at once. Instead of being text-only or image-only, it understands them together.
AI
Multimodal Model
An AI model that can process and generate multiple types of content, like text, images, audio, and video, within the same system. GPT-4o and Gemini are multimodal because you ca...
Business
MVP - Minimum Viable Product
The simplest version of your product that still solves the core problem. Ship fast, learn from real users, then improve. Don't build everything at once.
N
AI
Named Entity Recognition (NER)
AI that identifies and classifies proper nouns and specific items in text, like people, companies, dates, and locations. It can scan a news article and pull out every person men...
Mobile
Native App
An app built specifically for one platform (iOS or Android) using that platform's native language. It's faster and can use all device features, but you have to build it twice.
AI
Natural Language Processing (NLP)
AI that understands and works with human language. It's how chatbots understand your questions, how spam filters catch junk mail, and how voice assistants know what you're askin...
Business
NDA - Non-Disclosure Agreement
A contract that says we won't share your confidential information. Standard practice before discussing proprietary ideas or business secrets.
Business
Net Revenue Retention (NRR)
Revenue from existing customers this year compared to what they paid last year, including upgrades and churn. Over 100% means existing customers are spending more over time even...
AI
Neural Network
Software loosely inspired by how brains work—layers of connected "neurons" that process information. It's the foundation of modern AI, though it's really just math, not actual b...
Web
Next.js
A React framework by Vercel that adds server-side rendering, routing, and API endpoints out of the box. It's become the default way to build production React apps because it han...
Web
Node.js
A runtime that lets you run JavaScript outside the browser, primarily on servers. It enabled full-stack JavaScript development, meaning you can write both your frontend and back...
SEO
Nofollow Link
A link with a special tag telling search engines not to pass ranking authority to the linked page. Used for paid links, user-generated content, and untrusted sources. Google int...
Web
NoSQL
Databases that don't use traditional tables and SQL. They're more flexible—great for unstructured data or when you need to scale massively.
O
Web
OAuth
A standard that lets you log into apps using your Google, GitHub, or other accounts without sharing your password with each app.
AI
Object Detection
AI that identifies and locates specific things in images or video, drawing bounding boxes around them. It doesn't just say "there's a car," it shows you exactly where the car is...
Cloud
Observability
The ability to understand what's happening inside your system by looking at its outputs: logs, metrics, and traces. Monitoring tells you something is broken. Observability helps...
Mobile
Offline-First
Designing mobile apps to work without an internet connection by default, syncing when connectivity returns. It stores data locally and handles conflicts when the server and devi...
Marketing
Open Rate
The percentage of email recipients who open your email. If you send to 1,000 people and 250 open it, your open rate is 25%. Industry averages range from 15 to 25%. Subject lines...
Business
Open Source
Software with publicly available source code that anyone can use, modify, and distribute. Free to use doesn't always mean free of obligations though.
AI
Open Source AI
AI models where the code and often the weights are publicly available. You can download them, modify them, and run them yourself without paying per API call.
SEO
Organic CTR
The percentage of people who click your result after seeing it in search. Position 1 gets about 30% of clicks, position 5 gets around 5%. Improving your title tag and meta descr...
Marketing
Organic Traffic
Visitors who find your website through unpaid search results. They Googled something, your page appeared, they clicked. No ad spend involved. Organic traffic is the result of SE...
Web
ORM
A tool that lets you work with your database using regular code instead of writing SQL. You work with objects, and it translates to database queries.
Mobile
Over-the-Air Updates (OTA)
Pushing updates to your mobile app without going through the App Store or Google Play review process. React Native and Expo apps can update JavaScript bundles instantly. It's ho...
P
SEO
Page Authority
Similar to domain authority, but for a single page instead of your whole site. Some pages on your site might be stronger than others based on their backlinks and content quality.
SEO
Page Experience
Google's umbrella ranking signal combining Core Web Vitals, mobile-friendliness, HTTPS, and intrusive interstitial guidelines. It measures whether your pages are pleasant to use...
SEO
Page Speed
How fast your website loads. Faster sites rank better and convert more. Every second of delay costs you visitors and money.
Analytics
Page Speed Score
A 0-100 rating of how fast your web page loads, measured by tools like Google PageSpeed Insights. Scores above 90 are considered good, 50-89 needs improvement, and below 50 is p...
Analytics
Pageview
A count of every time a page on your website is loaded. If one visitor views 5 pages, that's 5 pageviews. Pageviews alone don't tell you much. 10,000 pageviews sounds impressive...
Marketing
Paid Traffic
Visitors who come to your website through paid advertising. Google Ads, Meta Ads, LinkedIn Ads, display networks. You pay for each click or impression. The advantage is speed: y...
SEO
Parasite SEO
Publishing content on high-authority domains like Reddit, Medium, or LinkedIn to rank quickly instead of building your own site's authority. It works because these platforms alr...
SEO
Passage Ranking
Google's ability to rank a specific passage within a longer page for a query, even if the overall page isn't focused on that topic. A single paragraph in a 3,000-word article ca...
Security
Passkeys
A password replacement that uses your device's biometrics (fingerprint or face) to log you in. No passwords to remember, nothing to type, and phishing-resistant by design. Apple...
E-commerce
Payment Gateway
The service that processes credit card and digital payments on your website. Stripe, PayPal, Square are common examples. The gateway securely transmits payment information betwe...
Web
Peer-to-Peer (P2P)
A network where computers communicate directly with each other instead of going through a central server. BitTorrent, blockchain networks, and WebRTC calls are all peer-to-peer....
Security
Penetration Testing
Hiring security experts to try to hack your systems, then telling you what they found. It's a controlled attack to discover vulnerabilities before real hackers do. Also called "...
SEO
People Also Ask
A Google SERP feature showing related questions that expand to reveal short answers. Getting your content featured here drives extra traffic. The trick is structuring your conte...
AI
Perplexity (AI Metric)
A measurement of how surprised a language model is by new text. Lower perplexity means the model predicts text well. It's one of the standard ways to compare language models, th...
SEO
Pillar Page
A long, authoritative page that covers a broad topic at a high level and links out to detailed cluster pages on each subtopic. It's the hub of a content cluster. Think of it as ...
Business
PLG (Product-Led Growth)
A strategy where the product itself drives acquisition, retention, and expansion instead of sales teams. Users sign up, experience the product's value, and upgrade on their own....
Business
PMF Survey
The "Sean Ellis test" for product-market fit. You ask users "How would you feel if you could no longer use this product?" If 40% or more say "very disappointed," you've likely f...
Business
POC - Proof of Concept
A small test to prove an idea actually works before investing serious time or money. It's not a product—it's evidence that building the product makes sense.
Marketing
PPC (Pay-Per-Click)
An advertising model where you pay only when someone clicks your ad. Google Ads is the most common PPC platform. You bid on keywords, set a daily budget, and pay each time a sea...
Business
Pricing Tiers
Offering multiple versions of your product at different price points, usually called Free, Pro, and Enterprise (or similar). Each tier adds more features. Three tiers work best ...
Web
Prisma
A TypeScript-first ORM that makes database queries type-safe and auto-completed. You define your schema in a readable format, and Prisma generates a client with full TypeScript ...
E-commerce
Product Feed
A structured file containing all your product data: names, prices, descriptions, images, availability. Product feeds are used by Google Shopping, Facebook Marketplace, and compa...
E-commerce
Product Page Optimization
Improving your product pages to increase sales. Good product pages have clear photos from multiple angles, detailed descriptions that address buyer concerns, visible pricing, so...
E-commerce
Product Photography
Images of your products that help customers understand what they're buying. Online shoppers can't touch or try products, so photos do all the heavy lifting. Include multiple ang...
Business
Product-Market Fit
When your product solves a real problem well enough that people actively want it and tell others about it. You know you have it when growth feels natural instead of forced. With...
SEO
Programmatic SEO
Creating thousands of pages at scale using templates and data, targeting long-tail keywords automatically. Zapier has a page for every app integration, Yelp has one for every bu...
AI
Prompt Engineering
The art of writing instructions that get AI to do what you actually want. It's surprisingly important—the same AI can give garbage or gold depending on how you ask.
AI
Prompt Injection
A security attack where someone tricks an AI into ignoring its instructions by hiding malicious prompts in the input. It's the AI equivalent of SQL injection.
AI
Proprietary AI
AI models owned by a company that you can only access through their API or products. You don't get the model weights or full control over how it runs.
Web
Props
Data you pass into a component to customize it. Short for "properties." They're how parent components talk to their children.
Business
Prototype
A working model of your product used for testing and feedback. It doesn't need to be pretty or complete—it needs to let people interact with your idea.
Mobile
Provisioning Profile
An Apple-specific file that ties your app, your developer account, and specific devices together. It's basically permission to run your app.
Mobile
Push Notifications
Messages sent directly to users' phones even when they're not in your app. Powerful for engagement, but abuse them and users will uninstall.
Web
PWA - Progressive Web App
A website that acts like a native app - works offline, sends push notifications, and can be installed on your home screen. All the app benefits without the app store.
Q
Marketing
Quality Score
Google's rating of the quality and relevance of your ads and landing pages, scored 1 to 10. Higher quality scores mean you pay less per click and get better ad positions. It's b...
AI
Quantization
Shrinking an AI model by using less precise numbers for its weights. A 4-bit quantized model is way smaller and faster than the original, with only a small quality drop.
R
AI
RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation)
A technique that lets AI search your documents before answering questions. Instead of just making stuff up, it pulls real info from your data first. This is how you build a chat...
Web
Rate Limiting
Capping how many requests someone can make in a time period. It protects your server from abuse and ensures fair usage.
Security
Rate Limiting (Security)
Restricting how many requests a user or IP can make in a given time window to prevent abuse. It stops brute force password attacks, API scraping, and DDoS attempts. If someone t...
Web
React
Meta's JavaScript library for building user interfaces using reusable components. It's the most popular frontend framework by a wide margin, powering Facebook, Instagram, Netfli...
Mobile
React Native
Facebook's framework for building cross-platform mobile apps using JavaScript and React. You write once and it compiles to native iOS and Android code.
Analytics
Real-Time Analytics
Seeing what's happening on your website right now. How many people are on the site, which pages they're viewing, where they came from. Useful during product launches, ad campaig...
AI
Recommendation System
AI that suggests things you might like based on your behavior and preferences. Netflix recommending shows, Spotify suggesting songs, and Amazon showing "customers also bought" a...
AI
Reinforcement Learning
Teaching AI through trial and error with rewards and penalties. The model tries different actions, gets feedback on what worked, and gradually learns the best strategy. It's how...
Web
Remix
A React framework that embraces web standards like forms, HTTP caching, and progressive enhancement. It focuses on server-side data loading and mutations, making apps work even ...
SEO
Render Budget
The resources Google allocates to rendering JavaScript-heavy pages during crawling. If your site relies heavily on client-side JavaScript, Google might not render all your conte...
Business
Requirements Gathering
The process of documenting exactly what the software needs to do. We ask a lot of questions now so we don't build the wrong thing later.
Web
Responsive Design
Building websites that look good on any screen size—phone, tablet, or desktop. The layout adjusts automatically based on the browser width.
Mobile
Responsive Images
Serving different image sizes based on the user's screen resolution and size. A phone doesn't need a 4K image designed for a desktop monitor. Using srcset and the picture elemen...
Web
REST API
The most common type of API that uses standard web requests like GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE. It's simple, predictable, and works everywhere.
Business
Retainer
A monthly agreement where you pay a set amount for ongoing work or availability. Good for continuous development needs. You get priority, they get predictable income.
Marketing
Retargeting
Showing ads to people who've already visited your website or interacted with your business. Someone looks at your pricing page, leaves without buying, then sees your ad on Insta...
Marketing
Retention Rate
The percentage of customers who continue doing business with you over a given period. The flip side of churn rate. If 95 out of 100 customers stick around, your retention rate i...
AI
Retrieval-Augmented Generation
The full name for RAG. It combines information retrieval (searching a knowledge base) with text generation (the LLM writing a response). The retrieval step grounds the AI in rea...
E-commerce
Return Policy
Your rules for how customers can return products and get refunds. A generous return policy actually increases sales because it reduces purchase anxiety. Zappos built their busin...
AI
Reward Model
An AI model trained to score how good another model's outputs are, based on human preferences. It acts as an automated judge during RLHF training, telling the main model which r...
Business
RFP - Request for Proposal
A document companies send out when they want agencies to bid on a project. It describes what they need and asks for your approach and pricing.
SEO
Rich Snippets
Enhanced search results that show extra info like star ratings, prices, or recipe times. They make your listing stand out and get more clicks.
AI
RLHF
Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback. Humans rate AI outputs as good or bad, and that feedback trains the model to give better answers. It's how ChatGPT learned to be help...
Marketing
ROAS (Return on Ad Spend)
How much revenue you earn for every dollar spent on advertising. A 4x ROAS means you make $4 for every $1 in ad spend. Different industries have different benchmarks, but most b...
SEO
Robots.txt
A text file that tells search engine bots which pages they can and can't crawl on your site. It's like a bouncer at a club—you decide who gets in where.
Analytics
ROI (Return on Investment)
How much profit you made relative to what you spent. If you invest $1,000 in marketing and generate $5,000 in revenue (with $2,000 in costs), your ROI is 200%. The formula is (R...
Cloud
Rollback
Reverting to a previous working version when something goes wrong. It's your "undo" button for deployments—essential when updates break things.
Business
Runway
How many months a startup can survive before running out of money at the current burn rate. Cash in bank divided by monthly burn. If you have $500K and burn $50K/month, you have...
S
Cloud
S3 (Simple Storage Service)
AWS's object storage service that's become the de facto standard for storing files in the cloud. Images, backups, logs, static websites—it all goes in S3. It's cheap, virtually ...
Business
SaaS - Software as a Service
Software you access through the internet and pay for on a subscription basis. You don't install anything - just log in and use it.
Web
Schema
The structure of your database—what tables exist, what columns they have, and how they relate to each other. It's like a blueprint.
SEO
Schema Markup
A specific vocabulary of structured data tags that help search engines understand your content. You add JSON-LD code to your pages telling Google exactly what type of content it...
Business
Scope Creep
When a project keeps growing beyond the original plan because people keep adding "just one more thing." The silent killer of timelines and budgets.
Analytics
Scroll Depth
How far down a page visitors scroll before leaving. If most people only see the top 25% of your page, everything below that mark is invisible to them. This matters because impor...
Business
Scrum
A specific agile framework with defined roles, sprints, and ceremonies like daily standups and retrospectives. More structured than just "being agile."
SEO
Search Intent
The reason behind a search query. Someone searching "best coffee maker" wants to buy (commercial intent), while "how does a coffee maker work" wants to learn (informational inte...
Cloud
Secrets Management
Securely storing and accessing passwords, API keys, certificates, and other sensitive data. Hardcoding secrets in your codebase is a security nightmare. Tools like AWS Secrets M...
Security
Security Audit
A thorough review of your systems, code, and practices to find security weaknesses. It covers everything from code vulnerabilities to employee access policies to how you handle ...
AI
Self-Attention
A specific type of attention where each word in a sentence looks at every other word to understand relationships. It's how the model figures out that "it" in "The cat sat on the...
AI
Semantic Search
Search that understands meaning, not just keywords. It finds results based on what you meant, even if you used different words. Way smarter than traditional search.
AI
Sentiment Analysis
AI that determines whether text expresses positive, negative, or neutral feelings. Businesses use it to monitor brand perception, analyze customer reviews, and gauge social medi...
SEO
SERP
The page you see after typing something into Google. It's where all the search results live—ads at the top, organic results below, and sometimes featured snippets, maps, or imag...
SEO
SERP Features
Special result types on Google beyond standard blue links. These include featured snippets, knowledge panels, image packs, video carousels, People Also Ask boxes, and local map ...
Web
Server Components
React components that run only on the server and send just the HTML to the browser, with zero JavaScript shipped to the client. They can directly access databases and APIs. Intr...
Web
Serverless Functions
Backend code that runs on-demand without you managing servers. You write the function, cloud provider handles scaling. Pay only when it executes.
Cloud
Service Mesh
A dedicated infrastructure layer that handles communication between microservices. It manages traffic routing, load balancing, encryption, and observability without changing you...
Web
Service Worker
A background script that sits between your web app and the network. It can intercept requests, cache responses, and enable offline functionality. Service workers are what make p...
Analytics
Session
A single visit to your website. A session starts when someone arrives and ends after 30 minutes of inactivity or at midnight. One person can generate multiple sessions. If they ...
Web
Session Management
Keeping track of logged-in users between requests. Since HTTP is stateless, you need sessions or tokens to remember who's who.
Analytics
Session Recording
A replay of an actual visitor's experience on your website. You can watch them scroll, click, hesitate, and navigate. It's like looking over their shoulder. Session recordings e...
Web
Shadow DOM
A way to encapsulate a component's HTML and CSS so it doesn't leak into or get affected by the rest of the page. Your component's styles stay contained, solving the age-old prob...
E-commerce
Shipping Strategy
Your approach to getting products to customers and what you charge for it. Free shipping increases conversion rates but eats into margins. Flat-rate shipping is predictable for ...
E-commerce
Shopify
The most popular hosted e-commerce platform. Shopify handles hosting, security, payments, and provides a store builder with themes and apps. Plans start at $39/month plus transa...
E-commerce
Shopping Cart Abandonment
When someone adds items to their online cart but leaves without completing the purchase. The average abandonment rate is around 70%, meaning 7 out of 10 people who start buying ...
Business
Sign-off
Formal approval that something is done and accepted. Once you sign off, we move forward. It protects both of us from endless revision loops.
SEO
Site Speed Optimization
The practice of making your website load faster through techniques like image compression, code minification, lazy loading, and caching. Every 100ms of improvement impacts conve...
SEO
Sitemap
An XML file that lists all the important pages on your site. It helps search engines discover and crawl your content faster, especially useful for new or large sites.
E-commerce
SKU (Stock Keeping Unit)
A unique code assigned to each product variant in your inventory. A blue t-shirt in size medium has a different SKU than the same shirt in large. SKUs help you track inventory, ...
Cloud
SLA
Service Level Agreement—a contract promising specific performance levels like uptime or response time. If they miss it, you usually get credits.
Web
Smart Contracts
Programs stored on a blockchain that automatically execute when conditions are met. They're called "contracts" because they enforce agreements without middlemen. Once deployed, ...
Marketing
Social Proof
Evidence that other people trust your business. Reviews, testimonials, client logos, case studies, social media follower counts, "as seen in" badges. Humans are wired to follow ...
Business
SOW - Statement of Work
A document that spells out exactly what we're building, how long it'll take, and how much it'll cost. The project blueprint that keeps everyone aligned.
Web
SPA - Single Page Application
A web app that loads once and never does a full page refresh. Navigation feels instant because it just swaps content instead of requesting new HTML from the server.
AI
Speculative Decoding
A speed trick where a small, fast model drafts several tokens ahead, then the large model checks them all at once. It's like having an intern write a rough draft that the expert...
AI
Speech Recognition
AI that converts spoken words into text. It's the technology behind Siri, Alexa, and meeting transcription tools. Modern systems can handle different accents, background noise, ...
Business
Sprint
A fixed time period (usually 1-2 weeks) where your team commits to completing specific work. At the end, you ship something usable and plan the next sprint.
Web
SQL
A language for talking to databases. You use it to ask questions like "give me all users who signed up this week" or "update this user's email address."
Security
SQL Injection
An attack where malicious SQL code gets inserted into input fields to manipulate your database. An attacker could type something into a login form that tricks your database into...
E-commerce
SSL Certificate
A security certificate that encrypts data between your website and your visitors. It's what puts the "S" in HTTPS and shows the lock icon in the browser. For e-commerce, SSL is ...
Web
SSL/TLS
Encryption protocols that secure data between browser and server. TLS is the modern version, but everyone still calls it SSL.
Web
SSR - Server Side Rendering
The server builds the full HTML page before sending it to the browser. Great for SEO and fast initial loads because users see content immediately instead of a blank screen.
Business
Stakeholder
Anyone who has a say in or is affected by the project. This includes decision-makers, end users, and anyone who'll complain if it goes wrong.
Web
State Management
How you handle data that changes over time in your app—like whether a user is logged in, what's in their cart, or if a modal is open.
Web
Static Site Generation
Building all your pages at deploy time so they're just HTML files sitting on a CDN. Blazing fast and dirt cheap to host since there's no server computing anything.
AI
Streaming
Getting AI responses word-by-word as they're generated instead of waiting for the complete answer. It makes apps feel faster because users see text appearing in real-time.
Web
Streaming SSR
Server-side rendering that sends HTML in chunks as it's ready instead of waiting for the entire page to render. Users see content loading progressively instead of staring at a b...
SEO
Structured Data
Code you add to your pages that helps search engines understand your content better. It can get you rich results like star ratings, recipe cards, or FAQ dropdowns in search.
AI
Structured Output
Getting AI to return data in a specific format like JSON instead of free-form text. Essential for building real applications because your code needs predictable, parseable respo...
Web
Subdomain
A prefix added to your main domain that acts as a separate address. Useful for organizing different parts of your site.
E-commerce
Subscription Commerce
A business model where customers pay a recurring fee for products or services. Monthly boxes, software subscriptions, membership sites, replenishment models (auto-shipping consu...
Security
Supply Chain Attack
Compromising software by attacking its dependencies or build process instead of the software itself. If a hacker inserts malicious code into a popular npm package, everyone who ...
Web
Svelte
A frontend framework that compiles your code into tiny, efficient vanilla JavaScript at build time. There's no virtual DOM or runtime framework code shipped to the browser. The ...
Web
SvelteKit
The official application framework for Svelte, similar to what Next.js is for React. It handles routing, server-side rendering, and deployment. If you're building a production S...
Mobile
Swift
Apple's programming language for building iOS, macOS, and watchOS apps. It replaced Objective-C with a cleaner, safer, and more modern syntax. If you're building a native iOS ap...
Mobile
SwiftUI
Apple's modern framework for building interfaces across iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch using the Swift language. It uses a declarative syntax where you describe what you wan...
AI
Synthetic Data
Fake data generated by AI to train other AI models. When you don't have enough real data or it's too sensitive to use, synthetic data can fill the gap.
AI
System Prompt
Hidden instructions given to an AI model before the user conversation starts. It sets the model's behavior, personality, and constraints. When ChatGPT acts like a helpful assist...
T
Web
Tailwind CSS
A utility-first CSS framework where you style elements using pre-built class names like "bg-blue-500" and "text-center" directly in your HTML. It feels weird at first but dramat...
Business
Technical Debt
Shortcuts in code that save time now but create more work later. Like credit card debt—sometimes worth it for speed, but it accumulates interest if you don't pay it down.
AI
Temperature (AI)
A setting that controls how creative or random AI responses are. Low temperature = predictable and focused. High temperature = creative but potentially weird.
Cloud
Terraform
The most popular infrastructure as code tool, made by HashiCorp. You write configuration files describing your servers, databases, and networking, then Terraform creates it all ...
Mobile
TestFlight
Apple's official beta testing platform for iOS apps. You upload a build, invite testers, and they can install it before it hits the App Store.
AI
Text Classification
AI that sorts text into predefined categories. Spam detection, topic categorization, support ticket routing, and content moderation are all text classification. The model reads ...
AI
Text-to-Speech (TTS)
AI that converts written text into natural-sounding spoken audio. Modern TTS can clone specific voices, add emotion, and sound nearly indistinguishable from real humans. It powe...
AI
Throughput
How many requests your AI system can handle per second. High throughput means you can serve more users simultaneously without things grinding to a halt.
Business
Time and Materials
A billing model where you pay for actual hours worked plus any materials or software costs. Good for projects where scope isn't 100% clear upfront.
SEO
Title Tag
The clickable headline that shows up in search results. It's one of the most important on-page SEO factors—make it compelling and include your target keyword.
AI
Token Window
The maximum number of tokens an AI model can process in a single conversation, including both the input and output combined. If you hit the limit, the model starts "forgetting" ...
AI
Tokenizer
The component that chops text into tokens before feeding it to an AI model. Different models use different tokenizers, which means the same sentence can be split differently. It...
AI
Tokens
The chunks AI breaks text into for processing. Roughly 4 characters or 3/4 of a word. This is how AI pricing works—you pay per token in and out.
AI
Tool Use
An AI's ability to use external tools like web search, calculators, code execution, or APIs to accomplish tasks. It extends what the AI can do beyond just generating text.
SEO
Topical Authority
When search engines recognize your site as a trusted expert on a specific subject because you've published thorough, interlinked content covering all aspects of that topic. A si...
Analytics
Traffic Source
Where your website visitors come from. The main categories are organic search (Google), paid search (Google Ads), social media (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn), direct (typing yo...
AI
Training Data
The examples an AI learns from. Garbage in, garbage out—the quality of training data directly affects how good the AI is. It's the textbooks the AI studied.
AI
Transfer Learning
Reusing a model trained on one task as the starting point for a different task. Instead of training from scratch, you take a model that already understands language or images an...
AI
Transformer
The architecture that makes modern AI work. It's a specific way of building neural networks that's really good at understanding context and relationships in data. The "T" in GPT.
Web
tRPC
A TypeScript library that lets your frontend call backend functions with full type safety and no API layer in between. Change a function on the server, and your IDE immediately ...
Web
Turbopack
Vercel's Rust-based JavaScript bundler designed to replace Webpack, claiming to be up to 700x faster. It's built into Next.js and optimized for the React ecosystem. Still maturi...
Web
Turborepo
A build system for JavaScript monorepos that caches task results and runs things in parallel. If nothing changed in a package, it skips rebuilding it. Saves hours on CI builds f...
Security
Two-Factor Authentication (2FA)
Requiring two different types of proof to log in, usually a password plus a code from your phone. Even if someone steals your password, they can't get in without the second fact...
Web
TypeScript
JavaScript with type checking. You declare what kind of data variables hold, and the compiler catches bugs before your code runs. It adds some upfront work but prevents entire c...
U
Business
UAT - User Acceptance Testing
The final testing phase where actual users (or you) verify the software works as expected. It's your chance to catch issues before we call it done.
Business
Unit Economics
The revenue and costs associated with a single customer or unit. If you spend $50 to acquire a customer who generates $200 in profit over their lifetime, your unit economics are...
Mobile
Universal Links
Apple's system for opening specific app screens from regular web URLs. Tap a link to example.com/product/123, and if the user has the app, it opens there instead of the browser....
E-commerce
Upselling
Encouraging a customer to buy a more expensive version of what they're already considering. "Want the premium plan instead of basic?" or "Upgrade to the larger size for just $5 ...
Cloud
Uptime
The percentage of time your service is available and working. 99.9% uptime sounds great until you realize that's still 8+ hours of downtime per year.
Analytics
User Segmentation
Dividing your audience into groups based on shared characteristics. New visitors vs returning visitors. Mobile vs desktop users. Visitors from Google Ads vs organic search. Anal...
SEO
User Signals
Behavioral data that indicates how satisfied users are with search results, things like click-through rate, dwell time, and pogo-sticking (quickly bouncing between results). Goo...
Business
User Story
A simple sentence describing what a user wants to do and why. Format: "As a [user], I want to [action] so that [benefit]." Keeps development focused on real needs.
Marketing
User-Generated Content (UGC)
Content created by your customers rather than your brand. Reviews, photos, videos, social media posts about your product. UGC is incredibly powerful because people trust other c...
Analytics
UTM Parameters
Tags you add to URLs to track where traffic comes from. They look like ?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=spring-sale appended to your link. When someone clicks...
V
AI
Vector Database
A special database built to store and search embeddings fast. Regular databases search by exact matches; vector databases find similar meanings. Essential for RAG and semantic s...
Business
Vendor Lock-in
When switching away from a service becomes so painful or expensive that you're basically stuck with them. Something to avoid when possible.
Cloud
Vertical Scaling
Making an existing server more powerful by adding CPU, RAM, or storage. Simpler than horizontal scaling but has a ceiling. Eventually you hit the biggest server available. Datab...
Web
Virtual DOM
A lightweight copy of the real DOM that React uses to figure out what actually changed. It only updates the parts that need updating, making things faster.
Web
Vite
A modern build tool that starts your development server in milliseconds instead of seconds. It uses native ES modules during development so it doesn't need to bundle everything ...
Web
Vue.js
A progressive JavaScript framework known for being easy to learn. It doesn't force you to adopt everything at once. You can use as much or as little as you need. Popular in Asia...
Security
Vulnerability Scanning
Automated tools that scan your systems for known security weaknesses. Unlike penetration testing, it's automated and doesn't try to actually exploit the vulnerabilities. It catc...
W
Security
WAF (Web Application Firewall)
A firewall specifically designed to protect web applications. It sits between users and your app, filtering out malicious requests like SQL injection attempts and XSS attacks. C...
Web
Web Components
A set of browser-native standards for creating reusable custom HTML elements. Unlike React or Vue components, web components work everywhere without a framework. You can create ...
Web
Web Workers
Background threads that let you run heavy JavaScript without freezing the user interface. Normally JavaScript is single-threaded, meaning complex calculations block everything e...
Web
Web3
A vision for a decentralized internet where users own their data and identity through blockchain technology instead of relying on big tech companies. It includes cryptocurrencie...
Web
WebAssembly (Wasm)
A binary format that lets you run code written in languages like C++, Rust, or Go directly in the browser at near-native speed. It's how Figma runs a full design tool in your br...
Web
WebGL
A JavaScript API that renders 2D and 3D graphics in the browser using your GPU. It's how browser games, 3D product viewers, and interactive data visualizations run without any p...
Web
WebGPU
The next-generation graphics API replacing WebGL that gives browsers direct access to modern GPU features. It's significantly faster and can even run machine learning models in ...
Web
Webhook
A way for one app to notify another when something happens. Instead of constantly asking if something changed, you get pinged automatically.
Web
Webpack
The OG JavaScript bundler that combines all your files, images, and dependencies into optimized bundles for production. It's incredibly powerful but also incredibly complex to c...
Web
WebRTC
A technology that enables real-time audio, video, and data sharing directly between browsers without going through a server. It's what powers Google Meet, Discord voice chat, an...
Web
WebSocket
A persistent connection between browser and server that lets both sides send messages instantly. Unlike regular requests, the connection stays open.
Business
White-label
Software built so you can rebrand it as your own. We build it, you slap your logo on it and sell it to your customers.
Business
Wireframe
A basic sketch showing the layout and structure of a page without any design polish. Think blueprint, not finished building. It's about where things go, not how they look.
E-commerce
WooCommerce
A free, open-source e-commerce plugin for WordPress. It turns any WordPress site into an online store. The plugin itself is free, but you'll pay for hosting, themes, and extensi...
X
Mobile
Xcode
Apple's official IDE for developing iOS and macOS apps. It includes a code editor, simulator, debugger, Interface Builder, and everything else you need. Love it or hate it, ther...
Security
XSS (Cross-Site Scripting)
An attack where malicious JavaScript gets injected into a website and runs in other users' browsers. An attacker might sneak a script into a comment field that steals cookies or...
Z
Security
Zero Trust
A security model that assumes nothing and nobody should be trusted by default, even inside your own network. Every request gets verified regardless of where it comes from. The o...
Security
Zero-Knowledge Proof
A cryptographic method that lets you prove you know something without revealing the actual information. Like proving you're over 21 without showing your birthday, or proving you...
AI
Zero-shot Learning
When an AI can do a task it wasn't explicitly trained on, without any examples. You just describe what you want and it figures it out from its general knowledge.
474 terms across 10 categories