Glossary
Glossary
Plain-language definitions of the software, AI and automation terms we use across the site — no jargon, just what they actually mean.
866 terms
A
- Abstraction — Hiding the messy inner workings of code behind a simple interface so you can use it without knowing how it works.
- Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) — A stripped-down web format from Google designed to make pages load almost instantly on phones.
- Access Control — The set of rules that decides who can see or do what inside a system, and blocks everyone else.
- Accessibility (a11y) — The practice of building websites and apps so people with disabilities can perceive, understand and use them too.
- Accessible Navigation — Menus and links built so everyone, including keyboard and screen reader users, can find their way around a site.
- Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) — A set of HTML attributes that make complex web interfaces understandable to screen readers and other assistive tech.
- Accordion Menu — A list of headers that expand and collapse on click so only the section you need is open at a time.
- Action — The step in an automated workflow that actually does something, like sending an email or updating a record.
- Adapter Pattern — A design pattern that wraps one piece of code so it can plug into another that expects a different shape.
- Adaptive Design — A layout approach that ships several fixed designs and serves the one that best fits the visitor's screen size.
- Add-on — A small extra piece of software that adds a feature to an existing program without changing the program itself.
- Address Bar — The strip at the top of a browser where you type or read a website's address.
- Adobe Flash — A retired technology once used for animations, games and video on the web, now fully unsupported.
- Adobe XD — An Adobe design tool for drawing app and website screens and turning them into clickable prototypes.
- Adyen — A Dutch payment platform that lets businesses accept many payment methods worldwide through one connection.
- Agent memory — The mechanism that lets an AI agent remember earlier facts, decisions and conversations so it can act consistently over time.
- Agentic AI — AI that can plan and take a series of actions on its own to reach a goal, instead of just answering a single prompt.
- Agentic workflow — An automated process where an AI agent decides the next step itself instead of following a fixed script.
- Agile Development — A way of building software in short, repeating cycles so you can adjust as you learn instead of planning everything upfront.
- AI agent — A software program that uses an AI model to plan steps and take actions toward a goal, not just return a single answer.
- AI agent orchestration — The practice of coordinating multiple AI agents and tools so they work together on a larger task instead of acting alone.
- AI Algorithms — The step-by-step methods that let an AI system learn patterns from data and make predictions or decisions.
- AI Assistant — A software helper powered by AI that answers questions and completes everyday tasks through chat or voice.
- AI Classification — An AI technique that sorts inputs like text, images or emails into predefined categories automatically.
- AI Copilot — An AI assistant built into a tool that suggests, drafts or completes work while a person stays in control.
- AI Crawlers — Automated bots that scan websites to collect content for training AI models or answering questions in AI search tools.
- AI Evaluation — The process of testing an AI system to measure how accurate, safe and useful its outputs are before and after you put it into use.
- AI Guardrails — Rules and checks built around an AI system that stop it from giving harmful, off-topic or non-compliant answers.
- AI Model — A trained program that finds patterns in data and uses them to make predictions or generate new content like text, images or code.
- AI Orchestration — Coordinating multiple AI models, tools and steps so they work together as one reliable system instead of separate parts.
- AI orchestration layer — The software layer that coordinates AI models, data and tools so they work together as one system.
- AI Pipeline — A fixed sequence of steps that takes raw input, processes it through one or more AI models, and produces a finished result.
- AI Summarization — Using an AI model to shorten a long piece of text into a brief version that keeps the key points.
- AI Tools — Software products that put AI to work on a specific task, like writing text, generating images, or answering questions from your data.
- AI Video — Video created or edited by AI, where you describe a scene in words and a model generates the moving footage, or a tool edits and dubs existing clips.
- AI Workflow — A set sequence of steps, some powered by AI and some automatic, that takes a task from start to finish with little manual effort.
- AI-Generated Websites — Websites whose layout, copy or code are produced largely by AI tools instead of being hand-built from scratch by a designer and developer.
- AJAX — A technique that lets a web page fetch or send data in the background without reloading the whole page.
- Alerting — The automatic sending of a notification the moment a system crosses a threshold or starts misbehaving, so the right person knows before customers do.
- Algorithm — A step-by-step set of instructions a computer follows to solve a problem or get a result.
- Alpha Testing — An early round of testing done by the team or close insiders to catch big problems before real users see the software.
- Alt Tag — A short text description of an image that screen readers read aloud and search engines use to understand it.
- Anchor Tags — The HTML element that turns text or an image into a clickable link to another page or location.
- Angular — A full-featured JavaScript framework from Google for building large, structured web applications.
- Animation — Movement added to interface elements to guide attention, show change and make a product feel alive.
- Anomaly Detection — A technique that spots data points or events that break the normal pattern, so problems get flagged early.
- Apache — A long-running, free web server that receives requests from browsers and sends back the pages and files of a website.
- API — A defined interface that lets two software systems exchange data and trigger actions automatically.
- API Gateway — A single front door that sits in front of your services, routing each request to the right one and handling shared jobs like security.
- API Integration — Connecting two software systems through their APIs so they can share data and trigger actions automatically.
- API key rotation — The practice of regularly replacing the secret keys that apps use to access each other, so an old or leaked key stops working.
- App — A piece of software built to do a specific job for the people using it, on a phone, computer or in a browser.
- App Store — An online marketplace where people find, install and update apps, and where developers publish them under set rules.
- Apple Pay — Apple's digital wallet that lets customers pay online or in stores with a fingerprint, face scan or tap.
- Approval Workflow — An automated process that routes a request to the right person for a yes or no before it can continue.
- ARIA Label — An HTML attribute that gives an element a spoken name for screen readers when there is no visible text.
- Array — An ordered list that holds multiple values in one place, each reachable by its position number.
- Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) — A hypothetical AI that could learn and reason across any task as well as a human, rather than being limited to one job.
- Aspect Ratio — The fixed proportion between an element's width and its height, written as two numbers like 16:9.
- Astro — A modern web framework that builds very fast, content-heavy sites by shipping almost no JavaScript by default.
- Asynchronous Processing — Handling a task in the background so the system can keep working instead of waiting for it to finish.
- Atomic Design — A method for building interfaces from small reusable parts that combine into larger components and full pages.
- Attended Automation — Automation that runs alongside a person and needs them to start it or step in at certain points.
- Audit log — A time-stamped record of who did what and when inside a system, kept so actions can be reviewed later.
- Audit Trail — A connected history of every step a record or transaction went through, so the full story can be traced back from start to finish.
- Augmented Intelligence — An approach where AI supports and speeds up human decisions instead of replacing the person making them.
- Authentication — The process of proving you are who you claim to be before a system lets you in.
- Authorization — The step that decides what an already-identified user is allowed to do or see inside a system.
- Auto-scaling — A setup that automatically adds more computing power when traffic rises and removes it when traffic drops, so you only pay for what you use.
- Automation Audit Trail — A complete record of what an automation did, when, and with what data, kept for accountability and debugging.
- Automation Monitoring — Watching your automated workflows in real time to catch failures, slowdowns and errors before they cause harm.
- Automation ROI — The return on investment from automating a task, measured as the value gained against the cost to build and run it.
- Automation Script — A piece of code that performs a repetitive task on its own, without anyone clicking through it step by step.
- Automation Template — A ready-made starting point for a common automation that you copy and adjust instead of building from scratch.
- Automation Trigger — The event or condition that kicks off an automated workflow, deciding the exact moment it starts running.
- Automation Workflow — A connected series of automated steps that moves work from a starting event to a finished result without manual help.
- Autonomous AI — AI that can plan and carry out multi-step tasks on its own, with little or no human input along the way.
B
- B2B Web Design — Designing websites for companies that sell to other businesses, focused on trust, clarity and longer buying cycles.
- B2B Webshop — An online store built for business customers, with features like account pricing, bulk orders and invoicing.
- Back-end — The part of an application that runs on a server and handles data, logic and rules behind the screen the user sees.
- Back-to-Top Button — A small floating control that jumps the visitor straight back to the top of a long page in one click.
- Batch Processing — Handling a large group of tasks together in one scheduled run, rather than one at a time the moment each arrives.
- Benchmark — A standard test used to measure and compare how well AI models perform on a defined task.
- Beta Testing — A late testing phase where real users try a near-finished product so you can catch problems before launch.
- Big Data — Datasets so large or fast-moving that ordinary tools can't store, process or analyse them on their own.
- Big O Notation — A shorthand that describes how much slower or heavier a piece of code gets as the amount of data grows.
- Binary Search Tree — A way of storing data so that finding, adding or removing an item stays fast even as the collection grows large.
- Binary Tree — A branching data structure where every item links to at most two others, used to organise data for fast access.
- Bitbucket — A cloud platform by Atlassian for storing code in Git repositories and collaborating on it with a team.
- Blockchain — A shared record of transactions stored across many computers, where past entries cannot be quietly changed.
- Blue-green deployment — A release method that runs two identical environments and switches all traffic from the old one to the new one at once, so updates go live with no downtime.
- Boilerplate — Standard, repeated code or setup that has to be in place before the real, project-specific work begins.
- Bootstrap — A popular front-end toolkit of ready-made buttons, grids and layouts that speeds up building responsive websites.
- Bot Orchestrator — A central controller that schedules, starts, and monitors a fleet of automation bots so they don't trip over each other.
- Bottom-Up Design — An approach where you build small, working parts first and combine them into the larger system as you go.
- Branch — A separate copy of a codebase where you can work on changes safely without affecting the main version until you are ready to merge them in.
- Branching — A point in a workflow where it splits into different paths based on a condition, so the right steps run for each case.
- Breadcrumbs — A small navigation trail near the top of a page that shows where you are and how to step back up the site.
- Breadth-First Search — A way of exploring connected data level by level, checking everything one step away before going deeper.
- Breakpoint — A screen width at which a website's layout changes so it stays readable on phones, tablets and desktops.
- Broken Link — A link that points to a page or file that no longer exists, sending visitors to an error instead of content.
- Browser Compatibility — How consistently a website looks and works across different browsers like Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Edge.
- Browser Window — The frame on your screen where a web browser displays a website, including its tabs, address bar and content area.
- Bug — A flaw in software that makes it behave incorrectly, from a small visual glitch to a feature that fully breaks.
- Build — The step that turns a developer's source code into a finished, runnable version of an application ready to be tested or deployed.
- Build step — The automated stage that turns a developer's source code into the optimized files a browser or server actually runs.
- Bundler — A build tool that combines and compresses a website's many code files into a few optimized files for the browser.
- Business Intelligence — The practice of turning raw business data into reports and visuals that help people make better decisions.
- Business Process Automation (BPA) — Using software to run a whole business process end to end, replacing the manual steps people repeat every day.
- Business Rule — A clear statement of a company policy that software can check and act on automatically.
C
- C# — A modern, general-purpose programming language from Microsoft, used to build web, desktop and business software on the .NET platform.
- C++ — A fast, low-level programming language used for software that needs tight control over memory and speed.
- Cache Memory — A small, very fast pool of memory that keeps frequently used data close to the processor so it can be reached quickly.
- Caching — The practice of keeping a copy of data or results close by so a system can reuse them instead of fetching or recalculating from scratch.
- Caching layer — A dedicated part of a system that stores ready-made copies of data so requests can be served fast without hitting the database every time.
- Canary deployment — A release method that sends a new version to a small slice of users first, watches how it behaves, then rolls it out wider if all looks healthy.
- Canva — A browser-based design tool with ready-made templates that lets non-designers create graphics quickly.
- CAPTCHA — A small test on a web page that humans pass easily but automated bots usually fail, used to block spam and abuse.
- Card Layout — A design pattern that groups related content into rectangular blocks, or cards, arranged in a flexible grid.
- Catch-All — A rule that quietly accepts anything that does not match a specific destination, most often an email address that receives mail sent to any unknown name at a domain.
- CDN — A network of servers spread around the world that delivers website files from the location closest to each visitor.
- Chain-of-thought reasoning — A prompting style that makes an AI model work through a problem step by step before giving its final answer.
- Change data capture (CDC) — A method that watches a database for changes and forwards only the new or updated records to other systems.
- Chatbot — A software program that holds a text or voice conversation with people to answer questions or complete simple tasks.
- Chatbot Automation — Using a chat interface to answer questions and complete tasks for customers or staff without a person typing every reply.
- Chatbot vs Agent — The difference between a tool that only answers your questions and one that can take actions to get things done.
- ChatGPT — A popular AI chat assistant from OpenAI that answers questions and writes text in plain conversation.
- Checkout — The part of an online store where a customer reviews their cart, enters details and pays to complete a purchase.
- Checkout Flow — The step-by-step path a customer follows from cart to confirmed payment in an online store.
- Checkout Process — The full procedure a customer completes to pay for and confirm an order in an online store.
- Chromium — The open-source browser project that powers Chrome, Edge and many other browsers as their shared foundation.
- Chunking — The step of splitting a long document into smaller pieces so an AI system can search and use them effectively.
- CI/CD — An automated pipeline that tests and ships code changes safely, so updates go live without manual steps.
- Citizen Developer — An employee without a coding background who builds apps or automations using no-code or low-code tools.
- Classification — An AI task that sorts each input into one of a set of predefined categories, like spam or not spam.
- Claude — Claude is a family of large language models built by Anthropic that can read, write, reason and use tools through a chat interface or an API.
- Clean Code — Code that is written to be clear and easy to read, so other developers can understand and change it without guessing.
- Cloud Computing — Renting computing power, storage and software over the internet instead of buying and running your own servers.
- Cloudflare — A global network that sits in front of your website to make it faster, block attacks and keep it online.
- CMYK — A four-ink color model (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Key/black) used for printing on paper rather than on screens.
- CNAME Record — A DNS setting that points one domain name to another, so several names can lead to the same place.
- Co-Pilot — A co-pilot is an AI feature that works alongside a person inside their software, suggesting and drafting while the human stays in control.
- Code Review — A step where another developer reads proposed code changes before they go live, to catch bugs and keep quality consistent.
- Code splitting — A technique that breaks a website's JavaScript into smaller chunks so the browser only downloads the code it needs right now.
- Codebase — The complete collection of source code that makes up a software project, kept together and tracked as one body of work.
- Color Code — A short text value, like #1BB1ED or rgb(27,177,237), that tells software exactly which color to display.
- Color Models — Systems like RGB and CMYK that describe how colors are created and stored, each suited to a different medium.
- Color Scheme — The deliberate set of colors chosen for a design, including a main color, supporting tones and accents.
- Command-Line Interface (CLI) — A text-based way to control a computer by typing commands instead of clicking buttons in a graphical interface.
- Commit — A saved snapshot of code changes with a short note, recorded in version control so the project's history can be tracked and undone.
- Component library — A reusable collection of pre-built interface pieces, like buttons and forms, that teams assemble into screens.
- Computer Vision — Computer vision is the field of AI that teaches software to interpret images and video, so a computer can recognise what it sees.
- Conditional Access — A security rule that allows or blocks a login based on the situation, like the user's device, location or risk level, not just their password.
- Conditional Logic — Rules that tell an automation to do different things depending on the data it sees, usually as 'if this, then that'.
- Connection pooling — A technique that reuses a set of open database connections instead of opening a new one for every request, which keeps an app fast under load.
- Connector — A prebuilt piece that lets an automation tool talk to a specific app like Slack, Gmail or Salesforce without custom code.
- Console Log — A simple command developers use to print messages while code runs, so they can see what is happening inside a program.
- Container — A lightweight package that bundles an app with everything it needs to run the same way on any machine.
- Container orchestration — Software that automatically manages many containers across servers, deciding where each runs, restarting failures and scaling up under load.
- Containerization — Packaging software into self-contained units so it runs the same way on any environment without surprises.
- Content Management System — Software that lets non-technical people create, edit and publish website content without touching code.
- Content Security Policy — A rule sent by a website that tells the browser exactly which sources of scripts, images and styles it is allowed to load, blocking everything else.
- Context engineering — Context engineering is the practice of deciding what information to put in front of an AI model so it gives accurate, relevant answers.
- Context Retrieval — Context retrieval is the step where an AI system fetches the most relevant pieces of your data to answer a question accurately.
- Context Window — The context window is the maximum amount of text an AI model can consider at once, measured in tokens, including both your input and its reply.
- Context-Aware Navigation — Navigation that adapts what it shows based on where the user is, what they are doing, or which device they use.
- Continuous Deployment — A practice where every code change that passes automated tests is released to users automatically, with no manual step.
- Continuous Integration — A practice where developers merge their code changes often and an automated system tests each one right away.
- Continuous Learning — Continuous learning is the practice of keeping an AI model up to date by regularly retraining it on new data instead of leaving it frozen.
- Contrast — The visible difference between elements, such as light text on a dark background, that makes content readable and clear.
- Conversational AI — Conversational AI is technology that lets people interact with software using natural language, through chat or voice, instead of buttons and forms.
- Copilot — A copilot is an AI helper built into a tool that suggests, drafts and explains while you work, leaving the final decision to you.
- Core Web Vitals — A set of three Google metrics that measure how fast, stable and responsive a web page feels to real visitors.
- Cosine similarity — A maths formula that measures how similar two pieces of text are by comparing the direction of their numerical representations.
- Cost per token — The price an AI provider charges for each chunk of text a model reads or writes, which adds up to your total bill.
- Crawling — The process where search engines send automated bots to discover and read the pages of your website.
- Cron job — A task that a system runs automatically on a fixed schedule, like every night at 2 AM or every Monday morning.
- Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) — A browser security rule that controls when a web page from one domain is allowed to fetch data from another domain.
- Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) — An attack that tricks your browser into sending an action to a site you are logged into, without your knowledge or consent.
- Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) — An attack where malicious code is slipped into a web page and then runs in the browser of anyone who visits it.
- CRUD — The four basic operations almost every app performs on data: Create, Read, Update and Delete.
- CSS — The language that controls how a website looks: colours, fonts, spacing and layout.
- CSS Flexible Box Layout — A CSS layout system that arranges items in a single row or column and spaces them out automatically.
- CSS Grid Layout — A CSS layout system that arranges content in rows and columns at the same time, like a flexible spreadsheet for page design.
- Cumulative Layout Shift — A Google metric that measures how much a page's content unexpectedly jumps around while it loads.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) — A Google score that measures how much a page's content jumps around while it loads.
- Custom Animations — Bespoke motion built specifically for a product, rather than generic stock effects, to fit its brand and behaviour.
- Custom System — Software built specifically for one organisation's way of working, instead of a ready-made product everyone shares.
- Customer Data Platform — A system that pulls customer data from all your tools into one place and builds a single profile per person.
- Customer Portal — A secure, logged-in area of a website where customers manage their account, orders, invoices and support themselves.
D
- DALL-E — An OpenAI system that creates original images from a written description you type in plain language.
- Dark mode — A display option that shows light text and elements on a dark background instead of the usual dark-on-light.
- Dark Mode UI — The craft of designing an interface that genuinely works in dark mode, with the right colors, depth and contrast.
- Dashboard — A single screen that pulls together your most important numbers and charts so you can see how things are going at a glance.
- Data Anonymization — The process of stripping personal details from data so individuals can no longer be identified from it.
- Data Backup — A spare copy of your data, kept somewhere safe, so you can recover it if the original is lost or damaged.
- Data Breach — A security incident where private data is accessed, taken or exposed by someone who was not supposed to see it.
- Data Center — A specialised building full of servers that stores data and runs the online services people use every day.
- Data Cleaning — The work of fixing errors, gaps and inconsistencies in data so it can be trusted and used.
- Data Encryption — Scrambling data with a key so only someone holding the matching key can read it.
- Data enrichment — Adding extra details to your existing records from other sources, so each entry is more complete and useful.
- Data Entry Automation — Software that fills in records and forms for you by pulling data from one place and typing it into another.
- Data Extraction — Pulling specific pieces of information out of documents, websites or systems so they can be used somewhere else.
- Data Governance — The rules and responsibilities that decide who can use which data, how, and to what standard of quality.
- Data Integration — Connecting separate systems so their data flows together and stays consistent across all of them.
- Data Labeling — The work of tagging raw examples with the right answers so an AI model can learn from them.
- Data lake — A large storage area that holds raw data of any type in its original form, ready to be used later.
- Data lakehouse — A storage approach that combines the cheap, flexible storage of a data lake with the structure and reliability of a data warehouse.
- Data lineage — A record of where each piece of data came from, how it changed, and where it ended up across your systems.
- Data Mapping — Defining which field in one system matches which field in another, so data lands in the right place when it moves.
- Data Migration — The process of moving data from one system or storage location to another, usually during an upgrade or platform switch.
- Data pipeline — An automated chain of steps that moves data from a source to a destination, cleaning and reshaping it along the way.
- Data Pipelines — The collection of automated routes that move data through an organisation, from raw sources to finished reports.
- Data Readiness Check — An assessment of whether your data is complete, clean and structured enough to support a new system, report or AI project.
- Data residency — The rule or choice about which country or region your data is physically stored and processed in.
- Data Structure — A way of organising data in a computer so it can be stored and accessed efficiently for a given task.
- Data Synchronization — The process of keeping the same data identical across two or more systems so a change in one shows up in the others.
- Data Transformation — Reshaping data from the format one system produces into the format another system expects.
- Data validation — The process of checking that data is correct, complete and in the expected format before it is used or stored.
- Data warehouse — A central database built to store and analyse large amounts of business data from many sources for reporting.
- Database Management System (DBMS) — The software that stores, organises and controls access to a database so applications can read and write data safely.
- Database Normalization — A way of organising a database so each fact is stored once, reducing duplication and the errors it causes.
- Dead-letter queue — A holding area where messages or tasks land when they fail to process, so they are not lost and can be reviewed later.
- Debugging — The process of finding and fixing errors, called bugs, that stop software from working as intended.
- Decision Table — A grid that lists conditions and the action to take for each combination, used to make business rules clear and easy to maintain.
- Deduplication — The process of finding and removing duplicate records so each thing in your data appears only once.
- Deep Learning — A type of machine learning that uses layered neural networks to find patterns in large amounts of data on its own.
- Deep Link — A link that opens a specific page or screen inside a website or app, instead of dropping you on the homepage.
- Deepfake — A fake but realistic image, video or audio clip made by AI to show a person saying or doing something they never did.
- DeepMind — A leading AI research lab, now part of Google, known for breakthroughs like AlphaGo, AlphaFold and the Gemini models.
- Dependency Injection — A design technique where a piece of code is handed the tools it needs from outside, instead of creating them itself.
- Depth-First Search — An algorithm for exploring a tree or network by following one path as far as it goes before backtracking to try another.
- Design Pattern — A proven, reusable solution to a common software problem that developers can apply instead of reinventing it each time.
- Design System — A shared library of reusable components, rules and tokens that keeps a product looking and behaving consistently across every screen.
- Design Thinking — A problem-solving approach that starts with real user needs and tests ideas quickly before committing to a full build.
- Design Tokens — Named values for things like color and spacing that store design decisions once so they can be reused everywhere in code and design.
- DevOps — A way of working that brings software development and IT operations together to release software faster and more reliably.
- DevSecOps — A way of working that builds security checks into the software pipeline from the start, instead of bolting them on at the end.
- Digital Worker — A software bot built to handle a full job role's worth of repetitive tasks, working alongside human staff.
- Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) — An attack that floods a website or service with fake traffic from many machines until it slows down or goes offline.
- Distributed tracing — A way to follow a single user request as it travels through many small services, so you can see exactly where it slowed down or failed.
- Django — A popular Python web framework that handles the common plumbing of a website so developers can focus on features.
- DNS Records — The individual settings inside a domain's configuration that tell the internet where to send web traffic, email, and other services.
- Docker — A tool that packages an application with everything it needs into a portable container, so it runs the same way on any machine.
- Document AI — AI that reads documents like invoices and contracts to pull out the useful fields automatically, without manual typing.
- Document Q&A — An AI feature that lets you ask plain-language questions about a document and get answers drawn straight from its text.
- Domain Name — The human-readable web address people type to reach your site, like topdevs.nl, instead of a string of numbers.
- Domain Name System (DNS) — The internet's address book that turns a human-friendly domain name into the numeric IP address a computer needs to find a website.
- Drag-and-Drop Builder — A visual tool that lets you build web pages by dragging blocks into place, without writing any code.
- Dropdown Menu — A control that hides a list of options behind a single button and reveals them when the user clicks or taps it.
- DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) — A coding principle that says every piece of logic should live in exactly one place, so you never have to fix the same thing twice.
- Dynamic Content — Web content that changes based on the visitor, the data, or the moment, instead of staying the same for everyone.
- Dynamic Routing — A technique where one page template serves many URLs by reading the address and loading the matching content.
- Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM) — An agile project framework that fixes the budget, time and quality up front and adjusts the scope to fit, so a project always delivers on the deadline.
E
- E-commerce — Buying and selling products or services online, from the storefront and cart to payment and delivery.
- Edge AI — Running AI models directly on a local device instead of sending data to a cloud server.
- Edge function — A small piece of server code that runs close to the visitor, in data centres worldwide, for a faster response.
- Edge Functions — Server code that runs in a network of locations near your visitors, so requests are handled faster than from one central server.
- ELT (extract, load, transform) — A way of moving data where you load the raw data into the warehouse first, then transform it there.
- Email Automation — Sending the right emails automatically based on a trigger or schedule, instead of writing and sending each one by hand.
- Embedding model — An AI model that turns text, images or other data into a list of numbers that captures their meaning.
- Embeddings — Lists of numbers that represent the meaning of text, images or other data so a computer can compare them.
- Encapsulation — A programming principle that bundles data together with the code that handles it and hides the inner workings behind a clean, controlled interface.
- Encryption at rest — Keeping stored data encrypted on disk so that a stolen drive or database file is unreadable without the key.
- Encryption in transit — Encrypting data while it travels across a network so nobody can read or change it on the way.
- End User — The person who actually uses your software day to day, as opposed to the developers who build it or the managers who buy it.
- End-to-End Automation — Automating a whole process from the first trigger to the final result, with no manual handoffs in the middle.
- End-to-end test — A test that runs through a complete user journey from start to finish to check the whole system works together, not just the individual parts.
- Endpoint — A specific web address an application calls to send or receive a particular piece of data through an API.
- Entity Extraction — Automatically pulling out specific facts like names, dates and amounts from unstructured text.
- Environment — A separate copy of your software setup, such as development, testing, or production, where code runs at a particular stage before reaching real users.
- EPS — A vector graphics file format used mainly in print, able to scale a logo to any size without losing sharpness.
- ERP System — A single connected platform that runs core business processes like finance, inventory, purchasing and HR from one shared set of data.
- Error Code — A short number or label that software returns to tell you exactly what went wrong, so the right problem can be found and fixed.
- Error Handling — The part of software that decides what happens when something goes wrong, so a single failure doesn't crash the whole system.
- Ethical AI — The practice of building and using AI in a way that is fair, transparent and respects people's rights.
- Ethical Hacker — A security expert who breaks into systems with permission, to find weaknesses before a real attacker does.
- ETL (extract, transform, load) — A way of moving data where you clean and reshape it before loading it into its final destination.
- ETL Automation — Automatically extracting data from sources, reshaping it, and loading it into a destination like a database or warehouse.
- Evals (model evaluation) — Structured tests that measure how well an AI model performs on the tasks you actually care about.
- Event Bus — A shared channel where systems publish events and any interested system can subscribe to receive them.
- Event Sourcing — A way of storing data as a full history of changes instead of only the latest state, so you can always rebuild and audit how things got to where they are.
- Event-driven architecture — A way of building software where parts react to events as they happen, instead of constantly asking each other for updates.
- Event-Driven Automation — Automation that runs the moment something happens in a system, rather than on a fixed schedule.
- Event-Driven Language — A programming style where code runs in response to events like clicks, messages or sensor signals rather than in a fixed top-to-bottom order.
- Eventual consistency — A model where copies of data may briefly differ but are guaranteed to match given enough time.
- Exception — A signal that software raises when something goes wrong at runtime, so the problem can be caught and handled instead of crashing silently.
- Exception Handling — The part of an automation that decides what to do when a step fails instead of letting the whole process break.
- Exponential Backoff — A retry strategy that waits longer after each failed attempt, instead of hammering a system that is already struggling.
- Express.js — A lightweight framework for Node.js that makes it quick to build web servers and APIs in JavaScript.
- Extended Relationship Management (xRM) — A flexible platform that manages any kind of relationship or record your business tracks, not just customers.
F
- Fatal Error — A failure so severe that the program cannot continue and stops running, usually with a crash or an error screen.
- Favicon — The tiny icon for your site that shows in the browser tab, bookmarks and history, usually a small version of your logo.
- Feature — A distinct piece of functionality in a product that does something useful for the people using it.
- Feature flag — A switch in your code that turns a feature on or off without redeploying, so you can release, hide, or test changes for specific users instantly.
- Feature Flagging — The practice of controlling which features are visible to which users through on/off switches in code, so teams can release gradually and safely.
- Few-shot prompting — Giving an AI a handful of worked examples inside the prompt so it copies the pattern you want.
- Field Mapping — Defining which data field in one system matches which field in another so information transfers correctly.
- Figma — A browser-based design tool where teams draw, prototype and collaborate on interfaces in real time.
- File Transfer Automation — Automatically moving files between systems, servers, or partners on a schedule or trigger, without manual uploads.
- Fine-tuning — Further training an existing AI model on your own examples so it specialises in your task or style.
- Firefox — A free, open-source web browser made by Mozilla, known for privacy features and following web standards closely.
- First Input Delay (FID) — A web performance metric that measures how long a page takes to respond the first time a visitor clicks, taps or presses a key.
- Flat Design — A visual style that strips away shadows and gloss in favor of clean shapes, solid colors and clear typography.
- Fluid Grids — A layout system where columns are sized in percentages so the page stretches and shrinks smoothly to fit any screen.
- Flutter — An open-source toolkit from Google for building apps that run on iOS, Android, web and desktop from a single codebase.
- Font Stack — An ordered list of fonts a browser tries one by one, so text still looks right if the first choice fails to load.
- Footer — The strip at the bottom of every web page that holds secondary links, contact details and legal information.
- Footer Navigation — The set of links in a website's footer that gives visitors a secondary route to important pages.
- Form Automation — Automatically processing form submissions so they trigger actions like saving data, sending emails, or updating a CRM.
- Foundation Model — A large AI model trained on broad data that can be adapted to many different tasks.
- Framework — A ready-made structure of reusable code that gives developers a head start and a set of conventions for building software.
- Front-End — The part of a website or app that runs in the browser and that visitors actually see and interact with.
- FTP (File Transfer Protocol) — An older standard for copying files between your computer and a web server over the internet.
- Full Stack — The complete set of layers in an application, from the front-end users see to the back-end and database behind it.
- Full Stack Developer — A developer who can work across all layers of an application, from the user-facing front-end to the back-end and database.
- Function / tool calling — A capability that lets an AI model trigger real software actions, like fetching data or sending an email, instead of only writing text.
- Function Calling — A feature that lets an AI model trigger real actions in your software by requesting a defined function.
- Functional Design — A document that describes what a piece of software must do for its users, written in plain language before any code is built.
- Functional Language — A programming language that builds software out of pure functions instead of step-by-step instructions that change shared data.
G
- GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) — The EU law that sets the rules for how organisations may collect, store and use personal data.
- GDPR Compliance — Meeting the EU privacy law's rules for how you collect, store and use people's personal data.
- Gemini — Google's family of multimodal AI models that can work with text, images, audio, video and code in a single system.
- General-Purpose Language — A programming language built to handle almost any kind of software, from websites to data tools, rather than one narrow task.
- Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) — A type of AI where two neural networks compete to produce realistic synthetic data such as images, audio or video.
- Generative AI — AI that creates new content such as text, images, code or audio instead of just classifying or analysing existing data.
- Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) — A family of AI language models from OpenAI that predict and generate text, and the engine behind ChatGPT.
- Generator — A piece of code that produces a series of values one at a time, on demand, instead of building the whole list in memory at once.
- GIF — A web image format that supports simple animation and is best known for short, looping clips.
- Git — A version-control tool that tracks every change to a project's code, so a team can work together and rewind to any earlier point.
- GitHub — An online platform that stores Git code projects and adds tools for teams to review, discuss, and ship changes together.
- Google AI Studio — A free web tool from Google for testing prompts and building with its Gemini models before adding them to your own software.
- Google Chrome — Google's web browser, the most widely used way people open websites on desktop and mobile.
- Google Lighthouse — A free Google tool that audits a web page and scores it on speed, accessibility, SEO and best practices.
- Google PageSpeed Insights — A free Google tool that tests how fast a web page loads and gives clear advice on making it faster.
- Google Pay — Google's digital wallet that lets shoppers pay online or in apps with a saved card in one tap.
- Google Search Console — A free Google tool that shows how your site performs in search and flags indexing or technical problems.
- Google Veo — Google's AI model that generates short, realistic video clips from a written description or a starting image.
- Graph — A way of storing data as things and the connections between them, instead of as rows in a table.
- Graphical User Interface (GUI) — The visual layer of buttons, icons, and menus that lets people use software by clicking and tapping instead of typing commands.
- GraphQL — A query language for APIs that lets an app ask for exactly the data it needs in a single request, and nothing more.
- GreenSock Animation Platform (GSAP) — A JavaScript library for building smooth, precise web animations that run reliably across browsers.
- Grok — The AI chatbot and language model built by xAI, Elon Musk's AI company, with tight ties to the X platform.
- Grounding — Tying an AI model's answers to real, verifiable sources so its responses stay accurate instead of made up.
- gRPC — A fast way for software services to call each other directly over the network, designed for speed and used heavily between microservices.
- GTmetrix — A free online tool that measures how fast a web page loads and gives a graded report of what is slowing it down.
- Guardrails — Rules and safety checks that keep an AI system from saying or doing things it should not.
H
- H1 Heading — The main heading of a web page that tells both readers and search engines what the page is about.
- H2 Heading — A second-level heading that breaks a web page into sections beneath the main H1 title.
- H3 Heading — A third-level heading used to split a section into smaller, more specific subsections.
- Hallucination — When an AI model states something false or invented while sounding completely confident and correct.
- Hamburger Menu — A button shown as three stacked lines that opens a hidden navigation menu, used mostly on small screens.
- Hardware — The physical parts of a computer you can actually touch, like the chips, memory and drives that run the software.
- Hash Table — A data structure that stores values by a key, so the right value can be found almost instantly no matter how much data there is.
- Hashing — Turning data into a fixed, one-way fingerprint that cannot be reversed back into the original.
- HashMap — A built-in data structure in many languages that stores values by a key for near-instant lookups, also known as a hash table.
- Headless CMS — A content system that stores your content and serves it through an API, with no fixed front-end attached.
- Headless Commerce — An e-commerce setup where the storefront customers see is separated from the engine that handles products and orders.
- Headless WordPress — Using WordPress only to manage content while a separate, faster front end displays it to visitors.
- Hex Code — A six-character code starting with a hash that tells a screen exactly which color to show, like #1BB1ED for a specific cyan.
- HeyGen — An AI video platform that turns a script into a video of a realistic talking presenter, including digital avatars and voice cloning.
- Homepage — The main landing page of a website, usually the first thing visitors see when they arrive.
- Honeypot — A decoy system or hidden trap set up to attract attackers and bots so they reveal themselves harmlessly.
- Hosting — The service that keeps your website or app running on a server so people on the internet can reach it.
- Hot module replacement (HMR) — A development feature that swaps changed code into a running app in the browser without a full reload, so the screen updates instantly.
- Hot reload — A development feature that updates a running app the instant you save a code change, without a full restart.
- Hover Animation — A small visual change that plays when a mouse pointer moves over an element, signaling that it can be clicked.
- Hreflang Tag — A piece of code that tells search engines which language and region version of a page to show each visitor.
- HTML — The standard markup language that defines the structure and content of every web page, like headings, paragraphs, links and images.
- HTTP — The protocol browsers and servers use to request and send web pages and data across the internet.
- HTTP Header — Extra information sent with every web request and response that describes the content, the sender and how it should be handled.
- HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) — A rule that tells browsers to only ever connect to your website over a secure, encrypted connection.
- HTTP/2 — A faster version of the HTTP protocol that lets a browser load many files over a single connection at once.
- HTTPS — The secure version of HTTP that encrypts the connection between a browser and a website so data cannot be read or tampered with in transit.
- Human Feedback Loop — A setup where people review an AI system's output and that feedback is fed back in to make the system better over time.
- Human-in-the-loop — An approach where a person reviews, approves or corrects an AI's decisions at key moments instead of letting it run fully on its own.
- Human-Machine Interface (HMI) — The screen or panel through which a person controls and monitors a machine, common in factories, vehicles, and equipment.
- Hybrid search — A search method that combines keyword matching with meaning-based vector search so results catch both exact terms and related concepts.
- Hydration — The step where a browser turns a static, pre-rendered page into an interactive one by attaching JavaScript to the existing HTML.
- Hyperautomation — An approach that combines several automation technologies to automate as much of a business end to end as possible.
- Hyperlink — A clickable piece of text or image that takes a visitor from one web page or location to another.
- Hyperparameters — The settings you choose before training an AI model that control how it learns, rather than what it learns from the data.
I
- Iconography — The set of small symbols a product uses to represent actions and ideas, like a magnifying glass for search or a trash can for delete.
- iDEAL — The dominant online payment method in the Netherlands that lets shoppers pay directly from their own bank account.
- Idempotency — A property where doing the same operation more than once has the exact same effect as doing it once.
- If Statements — A basic building block of code that runs an action only when a given condition is true.
- Image Generation — The use of AI to create original images from a text description, instead of drawing, photographing or finding them manually.
- Image Optimization — The practice of making website images smaller and faster to load without a visible drop in quality.
- Image Recognition — The ability of AI to look at a picture and identify what it contains, such as objects, text, faces or defects.
- IMAP — A standard email protocol that keeps your messages on the mail server and syncs them across all your devices.
- Incognito Window — A private browser mode that does not save your history, cookies or logins for that session once you close it.
- Independent Test Group — A team that tests software separately from the developers who built it, to catch problems with fresh eyes.
- Indexing — Building a lookup structure so a database can find rows fast without scanning every record.
- Inference — The moment an already-trained AI model is actually used to produce an answer or prediction from new input.
- Infinite Scroll — A loading pattern where new content appears automatically as the visitor scrolls, instead of clicking through numbered pages.
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) — A cloud model where you rent servers, storage and networking by the hour instead of buying your own hardware.
- Infrastructure as code (IaC) — Defining your servers and cloud setup in text files so the whole environment can be rebuilt automatically.
- Integrated Development Environment (IDE) — A single program where developers write, run, test and fix code, with helpful tools built right in.
- Integration Middleware — Software that sits between separate systems and lets them exchange data and work together without direct custom links.
- Integration platform (iPaaS) — A cloud service that connects your apps and automates data flows between them, usually through visual, prebuilt connectors.
- Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) — A cloud service that connects your apps and keeps data moving between them without building each link from scratch.
- Integration test — A test that checks whether separate parts of a system work correctly together, not just on their own.
- Integration Testing — The practice of testing how separate software components behave once they are connected and working together.
- Intelligent Document Processing — Technology that automatically reads documents, understands their content, and turns it into structured data for your systems.
- Intent Recognition — The AI task of working out what a user is actually trying to do from what they type or say, so the system can respond correctly.
- Interaction Design — The craft of shaping how a person and a product respond to each other, from a button press to the feedback that follows.
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP) — A Core Web Vitals metric that measures how quickly a page visibly reacts after you click, tap or type on it.
- Interface — An agreed boundary that defines how one part of a system talks to another, hiding the inner workings.
- Internal Link — A link that points from one page on your website to another page on the same website.
- Internal Search Engine — The search box on a website that lets visitors look up content within that single site, not across the whole web.
- Internationalization (i18n) — Building software so it can be adapted to different languages and regions without rewriting the code.
- Internet Explorer — Microsoft's old web browser, discontinued in 2022 and replaced by Microsoft Edge.
- Internet of Things (IoT) — A network of physical devices with sensors and internet connections that send and receive data automatically.
- Intranet — A private internal website that only an organisation's own staff can access, used to share tools, documents and information.
- Invoice Automation — Software that captures, reads and processes invoices so finance teams stop typing them in by hand.
- IP Address — The unique number that identifies a device on a network so data knows where to go.
- Islands Architecture — A way of building websites where most of the page is static HTML and only small interactive parts load JavaScript.
- ISO — An international body that publishes agreed standards, including ISO 27001, the widely used benchmark for managing information security.
- ISR (incremental static regeneration) — A technique that serves pre-built static pages but quietly rebuilds individual ones in the background when their content changes.
- Iterative Design — A way of working where you build, test, and refine a product in small repeated cycles instead of perfecting it all at once.
J
- Jailbreak — A technique that tricks an AI model or a device into ignoring its built-in restrictions and doing something it was designed to refuse.
- JAMstack — A way of building websites from pre-built pages, JavaScript and APIs, served fast from a CDN instead of a traditional web server.
- Jasper AI — An AI writing platform built for marketing teams that helps draft blog posts, ads, emails and other copy in a consistent brand voice.
- Java — A widely used programming language built to run on almost any device, popular for large business systems.
- JavaScript — The programming language that runs in every web browser and makes web pages interactive.
- JavaScript Libraries — Collections of pre-written JavaScript code that developers reuse so they don't have to build common features from scratch.
- Jenkins — An open-source automation server that builds, tests and deploys software whenever developers change the code.
- Jetpack (WordPress) — An official WordPress plugin that bundles security, backups, performance and site-stats tools into one package.
- Jira — A popular tool from Atlassian for tracking software tasks, bugs and project progress.
- JPEG — A widely used image format that shrinks photos to small file sizes by discarding detail the eye barely notices.
- jQuery — A long-running JavaScript library that made it easy to manipulate web pages and handle clicks across all browsers.
- JSON — A simple, text-based format for storing and exchanging data that both humans and software can read.
- JSON API — A web interface that sends and receives data formatted as JSON, the lightweight text format most modern apps use to exchange information.
- JSON mode — A model setting that forces the AI to return its answer as valid JSON instead of free-flowing prose.
- JSON Web Token (JWT) — A compact, signed token that carries a user's identity and permissions, letting a server trust a request without looking the user up every time.
K
- Kerning — The fine adjustment of space between individual letter pairs so words read evenly and look right.
- KISS Principle — A design rule that says keep things as simple as possible, because simple systems are easier to build and maintain.
- Knowledge Base — A central, searchable collection of articles and guides that answers common questions for staff or customers.
- Knowledge cutoff — The date after which an AI model has learned nothing, so it knows nothing about events or facts that appeared later.
- Knowledge Graph — A way of storing information as connected entities and the relationships between them, so software can follow the links like a map.
- Kubernetes — A system that automatically runs, scales and restarts containerised applications across many servers.
L
- Laravel — A popular PHP framework that speeds up building web applications by handling the common groundwork for you.
- Large Language Model — An AI trained on huge amounts of text that can read, write and answer questions in plain language.
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) — A Google speed metric that measures how long it takes for the biggest visible element on a page to load.
- Latency — The delay between asking a system for something and getting the first response back, measured in milliseconds.
- Lazy Loading — A technique that delays loading images and content until the visitor is about to scroll to them, making the first view faster.
- Lean — A way of working that focuses on delivering value fast and cutting out anything that wastes time or effort.
- Lean UX — A way of designing products in fast cycles, testing small ideas with real users before building the full thing.
- Legacy Application — An older software system still in daily use that is hard to update because of outdated technology.
- Letter Spacing — The even amount of space added between all letters in a word or line to improve how text reads and feels.
- Lightbox — A pop-up overlay that shows an enlarged image or video on top of a dimmed page, without leaving the page you are on.
- Lighthouse score — A 0-to-100 grade from Google's Lighthouse tool that rates a page on speed, accessibility, best practices and SEO.
- Linting — An automated check that scans source code for mistakes, risky patterns and style issues before it ever runs.
- Linux — A free, open-source operating system that powers most web servers, cloud platforms and connected devices.
- LLM (Large Language Model) — An AI model trained on huge amounts of text that can read, write and reason in natural language.
- LLM-as-judge — Using one AI model to score or rate the answers produced by another, so you can check quality at scale without a human reading everything.
- LLMOps — The practice of running, monitoring and improving large language models in production so AI features stay reliable and affordable over time.
- Load balancer — A traffic director that spreads incoming requests across several servers so no single one gets overwhelmed.
- Load Balancing — The practice of spreading work across multiple servers so the system stays fast and keeps running if one fails.
- Load Time — How long a web page takes to fully appear and become usable after a visitor requests it.
- Logging — The practice of recording timestamped events from your software so you can see what happened and when something went wrong.
- Lorem Ipsum — Scrambled placeholder text designers use to fill a layout before the real words are written.
- Low-code — A way of building software mostly by dragging visual blocks together, with small bits of real code added where you need them.
- Low-Code AI — Building AI-powered tools mostly through visual drag-and-drop interfaces, with only small bits of custom code where you need them.
- Low-Code Platform — A tool that lets teams build apps mainly by configuring visual components, with room to add custom code when needed.
M
- Machine Learning — A type of AI where software learns patterns from examples instead of being given step-by-step rules by a programmer.
- Machine Learning Bias — When an AI system makes systematically unfair or skewed decisions because the data it learned from was unbalanced or flawed.
- Machine Learning Operations (MLOps) — The set of practices for getting machine learning models into production and keeping them running reliably.
- Make (Integromat) — A visual automation tool, formerly called Integromat, that connects your apps and runs multi-step workflows on a drag-and-drop canvas.
- Malware — Any software written to harm a computer or its data, including viruses, spyware and ransomware that steal, damage or lock files.
- Manufacturing Execution System (MES) — Software that tracks and controls what happens on a factory floor in real time, from raw material to finished product.
- Materials Requirement Planning (MRP) — Software that calculates exactly which materials a factory needs to buy and make, and when, based on its production schedule.
- MCP (Model Context Protocol) — An open standard that lets AI models connect to your tools and data through one common interface instead of a custom integration for each one.
- MCP server — A small service that exposes your tools and data to an AI model through the Model Context Protocol.
- Mega Menu — A large dropdown panel that shows many navigation links grouped into clear columns when you open a menu item.
- Memory Leak — A bug where a program keeps holding on to memory it no longer needs, slowly eating up resources until things slow down or crash.
- Menu Structure — The way a website's navigation links are organised and grouped so visitors can find pages quickly.
- Merge — Combining changes from one line of work into another so that two separate sets of code edits become one.
- Message Broker — A piece of software that sits between systems and reliably passes messages from one to another so they never have to talk directly.
- Message queue — A line where messages wait their turn so a busy system can pick them up and process them one by one without dropping any.
- Metrics — Numbers measured over time that show how a system is performing, like response time, error rate or requests per second.
- MFA (multi-factor authentication) — A login method that requires two or more types of proof, such as a password plus a phone code, so a stolen password alone is not enough to get in.
- Micro-animations — Small, brief animations that give feedback or guide attention as people use an interface.
- Micro-interaction — A single small moment where an interface responds to a user action, like a button changing on tap.
- Micro-interactions — The small everyday responses an interface gives to user actions, designed together to make a product feel polished.
- Microcopy — The small bits of text in an interface, like button labels and error messages, that guide people through what to do next.
- Microservices — An architecture that splits an application into many small, independent services that each do one job and talk over the network.
- Microsoft Copilot — Microsoft's AI assistant built into Windows, Office apps and Teams to help with writing, summarizing and everyday work tasks.
- Microsoft Edge — Microsoft's web browser, built on the same Chromium engine as Google Chrome and bundled with Windows.
- Middleware — Software that sits in the middle of a request and handles shared work like logins, logging or formatting before the main code runs.
- Midjourney — An AI tool that creates high-quality images from a written text description.
- Minimum Viable Product — The smallest working version of a product that still delivers real value, built to test an idea with real users fast.
- Mirror Site — An exact copy of a website hosted at a different address, used as a backup or to spread the load across servers.
- Mobile-first — A design approach where you build a website for small phone screens first, then expand the layout for tablets and desktops.
- Mobile-first Design — An approach where you design the small phone screen first and then expand the layout outward to tablets and desktops.
- Mockups — Static, full-color visuals of a screen that show what a product will look like before any code is written.
- Model Context — All the information an AI model has in front of it when it answers a single request.
- Model Deployment — The step of taking a trained AI model and making it available for real use by an app or its users.
- Model distillation — A method where a large AI model trains a smaller one to copy its behaviour, giving you similar results at lower cost and speed.
- Model Drift — The slow drop in an AI model's accuracy as the real world changes and no longer matches its training data.
- Model Evaluation — The process of measuring how well an AI model performs before and after you put it to work.
- Model Monitoring — The ongoing practice of watching a live AI model to catch errors, slowdowns and falling accuracy.
- Model routing — Automatically sending each AI request to the best-suited model, balancing quality against speed and cost.
- Model Training — The process of teaching an AI model to make predictions by showing it many examples of data.
- Model-View-Controller (MVC) — A way of structuring an application by splitting it into three parts: the data, the screen the user sees, and the logic that connects them.
- Modular CMS — A content system built from independent, reusable blocks that editors can mix and rearrange to compose pages.
- Modular monolith — A single application built in clearly separated modules, giving structure without the operational overhead of microservices.
- Modular Web Design — A way of building websites from reusable, self-contained blocks that can be rearranged and reused across many pages.
- Mollie — A European payment provider that lets a website accept methods like iDEAL, credit card, and PayPal through one integration.
- Monorepo — A single code repository that holds many related projects together, so they can share code and be changed in one place.
- MoSCoW — A simple method for prioritising work by sorting it into Must have, Should have, Could have and Won't have.
- Motion Design — The craft of using movement and animation in an interface to guide attention, explain change and make a product feel alive.
- Mouse Tracking — Recording where visitors move, click and hover on a page to see how they actually use it.
- Multi-agent system — An AI architecture where multiple agents with different roles cooperate, each handling part of the work to solve one problem.
- Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) — A security approach that confirms identity using two or more independent factors, making a stolen password far less useful to an attacker.
- Multi-Page Websites — A website made of several separate pages, each with its own URL, that a visitor loads as they move between them.
- Multi-Step Forms — A form that splits its questions across several smaller screens instead of showing everything on one long page.
- Multi-storefront — A single e-commerce setup that powers several separate online stores from one shared backend.
- Multimodal AI — AI that processes and links multiple input types, like text, images, sound, and video, in a single model.
- Multivariate Testing — Testing several page elements at once to learn which combination performs best with real visitors.
- MVP — The smallest working version of a product that delivers real value and lets you learn from actual users.
- MySQL — A widely used open-source database that stores data in tables and is queried with SQL.
N
- n8n — An open-source tool that connects your apps and runs automated workflows without much custom code.
- Named Entity Recognition (NER) — A technique that scans text and automatically pulls out specific items like names, companies, dates, and amounts.
- Nano Banana — The nickname for a Google image-generation and editing model known for making precise, natural-looking edits to photos.
- Narrow AI — AI that is built to do one specific task very well, with no ability to think or act outside that single job.
- Natural Language Processing (NLP) — The field of AI that lets computers read, understand, and work with human language in text or speech.
- Natural Language Understanding (NLU) — The part of AI focused on grasping what a person actually means, including intent and meaning, not just the words.
- Navigation — The set of menus and links that lets visitors move around a website and find what they are looking for.
- Navigation Bar — The horizontal strip of menu links, usually at the top of a website, that takes visitors to the main pages.
- Navigation Structure — The way a website's pages are organised and linked together so visitors and search engines can find them logically.
- Network Traffic — The flow of data moving in and out of your servers, websites and apps over the internet or a private network.
- Neural Network — A computing system loosely modelled on the brain that learns patterns from data by adjusting connections between simple units.
- Nginx — A popular web server and reverse proxy that delivers websites and routes incoming traffic to the right application.
- No-code — A way of building apps and automations entirely through visual tools, with no programming required at all.
- No-code AI — Building working AI features by configuring visual tools instead of writing code by hand.
- Node.js — A runtime that lets developers build fast server-side applications using JavaScript, the same language the web browser uses.
- NoSQL — A family of databases that store data in flexible formats instead of strict rows and tables.
- Notification Automation — Software that sends the right alert to the right person automatically when a specific event happens, so nobody has to remember to do it.
- Notion — An all-in-one workspace app that combines notes, documents, databases and project boards, and connects to automation tools through its API.
- npm — The default package manager for Node.js, used to download and manage the reusable code libraries a JavaScript project depends on.
O
- OAuth — An open standard that lets you grant one app limited access to your account on another service without ever sharing your password.
- Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) — A way of writing software that groups data and the actions on that data into self-contained units called objects.
- Observability — The ability to understand what is happening inside a system from the outside, using its logs, metrics and traces.
- On-premise Software — Software that runs on servers you own and control inside your own building or data center, instead of in someone else's cloud.
- One-page Checkout — A checkout design that fits every step of paying into a single screen instead of spreading it across several pages.
- Open Source — Software whose source code is published openly, so anyone can read it, use it, change it and share it for free.
- Open-weights model — An AI model whose trained parameters are published, so you can download and run it on your own hardware.
- OpenAI — The AI lab behind ChatGPT and the GPT models, offering its AI to businesses through a paid API.
- Operating System — The core software that controls a computer's hardware and lets all other programs run on top of it.
- Optical Character Recognition (OCR) — Technology that reads text in scanned documents and images and turns it into editable, searchable data.
- ORM (object-relational mapping) — A tool that lets developers work with database records as normal code objects, instead of writing raw database queries by hand.
- Output Parsing — Turning an AI model's free-form text answer into clean, structured data your software can use.
- OWASP Top 10 — A regularly updated list of the ten most common and dangerous web application security risks, used as a baseline checklist by developers worldwide.
P
- Package manager — A tool that installs, updates and keeps track of the outside code libraries a software project depends on.
- Padding — The empty space inside an element, between its content and its edge, used to keep text and buttons from feeling cramped.
- Page Builder — A visual tool that lets you create web pages by dragging blocks around instead of writing code.
- PageSpeed Insights — A free Google tool that scores how fast a web page loads and tells you what is slowing it down.
- Pair Programming — A practice where two developers work together at one screen, one writing code while the other reviews and guides in real time.
- Parameter — A named input you pass into a piece of code so it can do its job with the specific values you give it.
- Partial hydration — A technique that only loads JavaScript for the interactive parts of a page, leaving the rest as plain fast HTML.
- Patch — A small software update that fixes a bug or security hole without changing how the rest of the program works.
- Patch Management — The ongoing process of finding, testing and applying software updates so known security holes are closed before attackers can use them.
- Payment Service Provider (PSP) — A company that handles online payments for your website so customers can pay by card, iDEAL or wallet.
- Penetration Test — A controlled, simulated cyberattack on your systems by an authorised expert to find weak spots before a real attacker does.
- Penetration testing — The ongoing practice of having security experts simulate real attacks on your systems to find and fix weaknesses before criminals exploit them.
- Performance Testing — Checking how fast and stable software stays when many people use it at once or push it hard.
- Permalink — The permanent, unchanging web address of a specific page or post so links to it never break.
- Perplexity AI — An AI-powered search engine that answers questions in plain language and cites the sources it used.
- Phishing — A scam where an attacker poses as a trusted person or company to trick you into handing over passwords, payments or sensitive data.
- PHP — A widely used programming language for building websites and web applications on the server.
- PII (personally identifiable information) — Any data that can identify a specific person, such as a name, email address, phone number or ID number.
- Placeholder — Temporary stand-in text or content that holds a spot until the real thing is added.
- Plain Text — Text with no formatting, fonts or styling, just the raw characters themselves.
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) — A cloud service that handles the servers and infrastructure for you, so your team can deploy and run apps without managing the underlying machines.
- Plugin — A small add-on that bolts extra features onto existing software without rebuilding it.
- PNG — A common image format that supports transparent backgrounds and keeps sharp detail, ideal for logos, icons and screenshots.
- Polling — A method where a system repeatedly checks another system at fixed intervals to see if something new has happened.
- Polling Trigger — A workflow starter that checks a source on a fixed schedule and kicks off the automation when it finds something new.
- Polling vs Webhook — The choice between checking a system on a schedule (polling) or letting it notify you the instant something changes (webhook).
- Polyfill — A small piece of code that adds a missing modern feature to older browsers so a site still works for everyone.
- Polymorphism — A programming idea where one instruction can work on many different types of objects, each responding in its own way.
- POST Request — A web request that sends data from the browser to a server, used to submit forms, sign in or save changes.
- Predictive Analytics — A way of using historical data and statistics to forecast what is likely to happen next.
- Predictive Model — A model trained on past data to forecast a likely future outcome, like which customers may cancel.
- Privacy Policy — A public document that explains what personal data your organisation collects, why, and what rights people have over it.
- Process Mining — A technique that reconstructs how a business process really runs by analysing the event logs your software already records.
- Product Configurator — An interactive tool on a website that lets customers customise a product and see the choices and price update live.
- Product Detail Page (PDP) — The page in an online store dedicated to a single product, with its photos, description, price and buy button.
- Product Feed — A structured file listing all your products and their details, used to push your catalogue to other platforms.
- Product Landing Page (PLP) — A focused web page built around one product or offer with a single clear goal, usually getting the visitor to buy or sign up.
- Product Photo — A clear, well-lit image of a product made to show it accurately and make people want to buy it online.
- Progressive Web App (PWA) — A website that behaves like a native app: it can be installed on a phone, works offline and sends push notifications.
- Project Management — The practice of planning, coordinating and tracking work so a software project actually gets delivered on time.
- Prompt — The instruction or question you give an AI model to tell it what you want it to do.
- Prompt / context caching — Context caching stores the unchanging part of an AI prompt so it can be reused, which cuts cost and speeds up repeated requests.
- Prompt Chaining — Breaking a big AI task into a sequence of smaller prompts, where each step feeds the next.
- Prompt Engineering — The skill of writing and refining AI instructions so the model reliably returns what you need.
- Prompt injection — An attack where hidden or malicious instructions are slipped into an AI system's input to make it ignore its rules or leak data.
- Prompt library — A shared, organized collection of tested AI prompts a team can reuse instead of rewriting each time.
- Prompt template — A reusable prompt with blanks you fill in, so an AI gets consistent instructions every time instead of a fresh one-off message.
- Proof of Concept — A small experiment built to prove whether an idea can actually work before investing in the full thing.
- Prototype — An interactive, clickable version of a product made to test how it works before the real thing is built.
- Prototyping — The process of quickly building and testing rough versions of a product to learn what works before committing to a full build.
- Pseudonymization — Replacing direct identifiers in your data with codes, so a record can no longer be linked to a person without a separately kept key.
- Pub/sub — A messaging pattern where senders publish events to a channel and any interested receivers subscribe to get them, without the two knowing about each other.
- Pull Request — A formal request to merge a developer's code changes into the main project, with a review step before it goes in.
- Python — A widely used programming language known for readable code, popular in web apps, data work and AI.
Q
- QR Code — A square barcode that a phone camera can scan to open a link, pay a bill or load information instantly.
- Quality Assurance — The practice of checking software against its requirements so problems are caught before users hit them.
- Quantization — A technique that shrinks an AI model by storing its numbers at lower precision, so it runs faster and on cheaper hardware.
- Query — A precise request you send to a database or system to fetch, filter or change specific data.
- Queue — A line of tasks waiting to be handled one by one, so a system can absorb spikes without falling over.
- Quickscan — A fast, lightweight check of your website or systems that surfaces the most obvious security weaknesses without a full audit.
R
- RAG evaluation — The process of measuring how well a retrieval-based AI system finds the right information and answers from it accurately.
- RAG vs fine-tuning — Two ways to give an AI model your own knowledge: RAG looks information up at answer time, fine-tuning bakes it into the model first.
- Ransomware — Malicious software that locks or encrypts your files and demands a payment to give them back.
- Rate limiting — A control that caps how many requests a user or system can make in a set time, protecting your service from abuse and overload.
- RBAC (role-based access control) — A way to manage who can do what in software by assigning permissions to roles instead of to individual people.
- RDFa — A way to add machine-readable meaning to your HTML so search engines and other tools understand what each part of a page is about.
- Reading Mode — A browser feature that strips a page down to just the article text and images, hiding ads, menus and clutter for easier reading.
- Real-Time User Monitoring — Watching how real visitors experience your site or app as it happens, measuring load speed, errors and slowdowns from their actual devices.
- Reasoning model — An AI model that works through a problem in steps before answering, rather than replying with the first thing that comes out.
- reCAPTCHA — A Google service that tells real human visitors apart from bots before they submit a form or sign in.
- Recommendation Engine — Software that predicts what a person is likely to want next and suggests it, based on their behaviour and that of similar users.
- Redirect — A rule that automatically sends a visitor from one web address to another, used when a page has moved or changed.
- Redis — An in-memory data store that keeps frequently used data in RAM so apps can read and write it extremely fast.
- Refactoring — Reworking the inside of existing code to make it cleaner, without changing what it does for users.
- Referrer — The web address a visitor came from, passed along when they click a link to your site, so you can see where traffic originates.
- Regression test — A check that re-runs old tests to confirm a new change did not break something that already worked.
- Reinforcement Learning — A way of training AI through trial and error, where good actions earn rewards and bad ones get penalised until the system learns the best behaviour.
- Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) — A training method that uses human ratings of AI answers to teach a model which responses people actually prefer.
- Relational Database — A database that stores data in linked tables of rows and columns, with clear relationships between them.
- Release Notes — A short, readable summary of what changed in a new version of software: features, fixes and updates.
- Repository — A central storage location that holds your project's code, its full change history, and every version of every file.
- Reranking — A second pass that reorders search results so the most relevant ones rise to the top before an AI uses them to answer.
- Responsive Design — A way of building websites so the layout automatically adjusts to fit any screen, from a wide monitor to a small phone.
- Responsive Logo — A logo that comes in several simplified versions so it stays clear at any size, from a website header down to a tiny favicon.
- REST API — The most common style of web API, where data is exposed as web addresses you read from and write to over HTTP.
- Retrieval — The step where an AI system searches your documents and pulls out the relevant pieces before writing an answer.
- Retrieval augmentation — The technique of fetching relevant information from your own sources at answer time and handing it to an AI model, so replies rest on facts instead of memory.
- Retrieval pipeline — The series of steps that finds the right pieces of your own data and hands them to an AI model before it answers.
- Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) — A method that feeds an AI model your own documents before it answers, so replies stay accurate and grounded.
- Retry Logic — The rules that decide whether and how an automation tries a failed step again instead of giving up at the first error.
- Reverse proxy — A server that sits in front of your application servers and forwards incoming requests to them, handling things like routing, security and caching along the way.
- RGB — The colour system screens use, mixing red, green and blue light to create every colour you see on a display.
- Rich Text — Text that can carry formatting like bold, italics, headings, lists and links, instead of plain unformatted characters.
- Robot — In software automation, a robot is a program that mimics human actions on a computer to carry out a task without a person.
- Robotic Process Automation — Software that automates repetitive, rule-based computer tasks by mimicking how a person clicks, types and moves data between systems.
- robots.txt — A small text file at the root of a website that tells search engine crawlers which pages they may or may not visit.
- Rollback — Returning your software to a previous working version after a new release causes problems.
- Row-level security (RLS) — A database rule that limits which rows of a table each user can see or change, enforced by the database itself.
- RPA (Robotic Process Automation) — Software robots that mimic human clicks and keystrokes to run repetitive computer tasks for you.
- RPA Bot — A single software worker in robotic process automation that runs one defined process by mimicking human clicks and keystrokes.
- RSS — A standard feed format that publishes a website's latest content so apps and tools can pull updates automatically.
- Rubber Duck Debugging — A technique where a developer explains their code out loud, line by line, to spot the bug by hearing it.
- Rules Engine — A software component that evaluates business rules and decides what should happen, kept separate from the rest of the code.
- Runway — An AI platform that generates and edits video from text prompts, images or existing clips.
S
- SaaS — Software you access over the internet and pay for as a subscription, instead of buying and installing it.
- Safari — Apple's web browser, the default on iPhone, iPad and Mac, built on the WebKit rendering engine.
- Saga pattern — A way to manage a multi-step process across separate services, with an undo action for each step if one fails.
- SAP — A large enterprise software vendor best known for ERP systems that run finance, supply chain and operations.
- Scalable Design — An approach to designing interfaces so they can grow with new features and content without falling apart or needing a rebuild.
- Scenario — In Make and similar tools, a scenario is one complete automated workflow built from connected steps that run in sequence.
- Scheduled Job — A task set to run automatically at a fixed time or interval, like every night at 2 AM, without anyone starting it.
- Scheduled Trigger — The part of an automation that watches the clock and starts a workflow at a set time or interval.
- Schema migration — A controlled, versioned change to a database's structure, like adding a column or table, applied step by step.
- Screen Scraping — Reading data straight off an application's screen when there is no proper API to get it any other way.
- Script — A small program that runs a set of instructions automatically, usually to handle a single repetitive task.
- Secrets management — The practice of storing and handling passwords, API keys and certificates safely instead of leaving them in plain code or files.
- Semantic Search — A search method that finds results by meaning rather than by matching exact keywords.
- Semantic versioning — A version-numbering rule where the three numbers in a release tell you how big the change is and whether it might break things.
- Sender Policy Framework (SPF) — An email rule that lists which servers are allowed to send mail for your domain, helping block forged messages.
- Sentiment Analysis — An AI technique that reads text and decides whether the tone is positive, negative or neutral.
- Server components — UI components that run and render on the server, sending finished HTML to the browser instead of heavy JavaScript.
- Server-Side Rendering — A technique where the server builds the full HTML of a page before sending it, so visitors and search engines see content immediately.
- Server-Side Scripting — Code that runs on the web server rather than in the visitor's browser, building the page and handling data before it reaches the user.
- Server-Side Tagging — A way to collect analytics and marketing data through your own server instead of loading tracking scripts directly in the visitor's browser.
- Serverless — A way of running code where the cloud provider manages the servers for you, and you pay only for the time your code actually runs.
- Serverless Website — A website that runs without you managing any servers, using cloud functions and a global content network instead of a fixed machine.
- Service Level Agreement (SLA) — A formal promise from a service provider about how reliable and fast a service will be, with consequences if those targets are missed.
- Service Level Indicator (SLI) — A specific number that measures how a service is performing, such as the percentage of requests that succeed or how fast pages load.
- Service Level Objective (SLO) — An internal target a team sets for how reliable a service should be, such as keeping successful requests above 99.9 percent.
- Set — A collection of items where every value is unique, with no duplicates and usually no fixed order.
- Shadow AI — The unsanctioned use of AI tools by employees without the knowledge or approval of their IT and security teams.
- Shipping Integration — A connection between your webshop and carriers like PostNL or DHL that automates labels, tracking and shipping rates.
- Sidebar — A vertical panel along the side of a screen that holds navigation, filters or extra content next to the main page.
- Similarity Search — A way of finding the items most alike to a given one by comparing their numeric representations.
- Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) — The standard internet protocol that servers use to send and relay email from one mailbox to another.
- Single Sign-On (SSO) — A login method that lets people use one set of credentials to access many apps instead of a separate password for each.
- Single-Column Layout — A page layout that stacks all content in one vertical column, guiding the reader straight down the page in a clear order.
- Single-Page Application — A web app that loads once and then updates content in place, so it feels like a desktop program rather than a series of page reloads.
- Single-Page Website — A website where all the content lives on one long scrolling page, navigated by scrolling or jump links rather than separate pages.
- Singleton Pattern — A design rule that makes sure only one instance of a particular object ever exists, shared everywhere it is needed.
- Sitemap — A file that lists all the important pages on your website so search engines can find and index them efficiently.
- Sketch — A Mac design app for creating user interfaces, icons and prototypes, popular before Figma became the team standard.
- SLA Automation — Software that tracks service-level deadlines and acts automatically, escalating or alerting, before a promise to a customer is broken.
- Sliders — An interface control you drag along a track to pick a value, or a rotating banner of images that slides through a series of slides.
- Smart Forms — Online forms that adapt to the user, showing relevant fields, validating input live, and reducing the effort needed to complete them.
- SOC 2 — A widely recognized audit report that proves a software company handles customer data securely and consistently.
- Software Design Document — A written plan that describes how a piece of software will be built before any real code is written.
- Software Requirements Specification — A document that records exactly what a piece of software must do, written down before development begins.
- SOLID Principles — Five guidelines for writing object-oriented code that stays easy to change and maintain as a project grows.
- Sora — OpenAI's text-to-video model that generates short, realistic video clips from a written prompt.
- Sorting Algorithm — A step-by-step method a computer uses to put a list of items into order, such as alphabetical or smallest to largest.
- Speech-to-Text (STT) — Technology that converts spoken audio into written text automatically.
- Sprint — A short, fixed period, usually one to two weeks, in which a development team builds and finishes an agreed set of work.
- Sprint Planning — A short meeting at the start of each sprint where the team decides what work to take on and how to approach it.
- SQL (Structured Query Language) — The standard language for reading, writing and managing data in relational databases.
- SQL Database — A database you read and write using the SQL language, storing data in structured, related tables.
- SQL Injection — An attack where a hacker sneaks database commands into a form or URL to read or destroy data they should not reach.
- SSG (static site generation) — A build method that turns your pages into plain HTML files ahead of time, so they load instantly when someone visits.
- SSL Certificate — A digital file that proves a website is genuine and encrypts the connection so data cannot be read in transit.
- SSR (server-side rendering) — A method where the server builds the full HTML for a page on each request, so visitors and search engines get complete content right away.
- Stable Diffusion — An open-source AI model that generates images from text descriptions and can run on your own hardware.
- Sticky Navigation — A menu bar that stays fixed at the top of the screen as the visitor scrolls, so the main links are always within reach.
- Storefront API — An interface that lets a custom shop front read product, cart, and checkout data from an e-commerce platform without using its built-in theme.
- Straight-Through Processing — A process that runs from start to finish with no manual steps, so a transaction completes without anyone touching it.
- Strategy Pattern — A design pattern that lets you swap between several interchangeable algorithms at runtime without changing the code that uses them.
- Streaming response — A way of sending an AI model's answer word by word as it is generated, instead of waiting for the whole reply to finish.
- Stress Testing — Deliberately pushing software past its expected limits to find out where and how it breaks under heavy load.
- Stripe — A payment platform that lets websites and apps accept card and online payments through a developer-friendly API.
- Structured Data — Extra code added to a web page that labels its content so search engines understand exactly what each part means.
- Structured logging — Recording application logs in a consistent, machine-readable format like JSON, so they can be searched and analysed instead of just read by eye.
- Structured output — An AI model returning its answer in a strict, machine-readable format like JSON instead of free-flowing text.
- Subdomain — A separate section of a website that lives in front of the main domain name, like shop.example.com, with its own pages and setup.
- Summarization — Using AI to condense a long piece of text into a short version that keeps the main points.
- Superintelligence — A hypothetical AI that would far surpass the best human minds across almost every field.
- Supervised Learning — Training an AI model on examples that already have the right answers attached, so it learns to predict those answers on new data.
- Swift — A programming language made by Apple, used to build apps for iPhone, iPad, Mac and other Apple devices.
- Swivel-Chair Work — Manual work where a person copies data between two systems by hand because the systems do not talk to each other.
- Symbolic AI — An older approach to AI that reasons using explicit human-written rules and logic rather than learning from data.
- Sync vs Async — Two ways software can wait for a task: synchronous waits for the answer right away, asynchronous lets work continue and gets the answer later.
- Synthetic data — Artificially generated data that mimics real data, used to train or test AI when real records are scarce or sensitive.
- System Integration — Connecting separate software systems so they share data and work together instead of running as isolated islands.
- System prompt — A hidden set of instructions that tells an AI model how to behave before any user message arrives.
T
- Tailwind CSS — A popular CSS framework that styles web pages with small utility classes written directly in the markup.
- Task Automation — Using software to perform a single repetitive task automatically, so a person no longer has to do it by hand.
- Task Mining — Recording how people actually use their computer to find which repetitive steps are worth automating.
- Task Scheduler — A tool that runs a task automatically at set times or intervals, like every night or every Monday at 9am.
- Tech Stack — The full set of programming languages, frameworks, databases and tools used to build and run a piece of software.
- Technical debt — The future cost of quick or messy coding shortcuts that make software harder and slower to change later.
- Technical Design — A plan that describes how software will be built technically, written before coding starts to guide the developers.
- Temperature — A setting that controls how random or predictable an AI model's text output is, from safe and repetitive to varied and creative.
- Template — A reusable starting layout or file with fixed parts and blanks to fill in, so you don't build the same thing from scratch each time.
- Test Automation — Using software to run checks on your application automatically, so bugs are caught before users see them.
- Test Case — A single, specific check that describes what to do, what input to use, and what result the software should produce.
- Test coverage — A measure of how much of your code is actually checked by automated tests, usually shown as a percentage.
- Test Plan — A document that describes what will be tested, how, by whom and when, so testing is organized instead of ad-hoc.
- Text Classification — Automatically sorting pieces of text into predefined categories, such as tagging an email as spam or a review as positive.
- Text Generation — The ability of an AI model to produce human-like written text from a prompt, one word at a time.
- Text-to-Speech (TTS) — Technology that turns written text into spoken audio using a synthetic but natural-sounding voice.
- The Golden Ratio — A proportion of roughly 1 to 1.618 that designers use to size and space elements in a way that feels naturally balanced.
- Theming — The practice of swapping a product's look, like colors and fonts, by changing one central set of values instead of editing every screen.
- Third-Party Cookies — Small tracking files set by a domain other than the one you are visiting, often used to follow people across different websites for advertising.
- Throttling — Deliberately limiting how fast or how often a system sends requests so it does not overload another service.
- Throughput — A measure of how much work an AI system can process in a given time, often counted in tokens or requests per second.
- Time to First Byte (TTFB) — The time between a browser asking for a page and receiving the very first byte of the server's response.
- Token — The small chunk of text, often a word or part of a word, that a language model reads and writes as its basic unit.
- Token limit — The maximum amount of text, measured in tokens, that an AI model can read and write in a single request.
- Token-Based Authentication — A login method where the server hands the user a signed token after sign-in, which is then sent with every request instead of the password.
- Tokenization — The step that splits text into small chunks called tokens so an AI model can read and process it.
- Tool Use — An AI model's ability to reach beyond text and use external tools, like search, a calculator or a database, to complete a task.
- Top-Down Design — A design approach that starts with the big picture of a system and breaks it down into smaller and smaller parts.
- Top-k retrieval — A setting that tells a search step to return only the k most relevant results, where k is a number you choose.
- Training Data — The collection of examples an AI model learns from, which shapes everything it can later do and how well it does it.
- Training Dataset — The collection of labeled or raw examples an AI model learns from during training.
- Transcription — The automatic conversion of spoken audio into written text.
- Transformer — The neural network architecture behind modern language models that reads a whole input at once and weighs which parts matter most.
- Transpilation — The process of converting code written in one programming language into another language that does the same thing.
- Transport Layer Security (TLS) — The encryption protocol that scrambles data while it travels between a browser and a server so nobody can read it in transit.
- Tree shaking — A build step that removes unused code from your final JavaScript bundle so the website ships less to download.
- Trigger — The event that starts an automated workflow, like a new email arriving or a form being submitted.
- Trigger-Action Model — The simple pattern behind most automation: when a trigger event happens, an action runs in response.
- Try-Catch — A code structure that attempts a risky operation and catches any error so the program can respond instead of crashing.
- Turing Test — A test where a person chats with a hidden human and a hidden machine, and the machine passes if the person can't reliably tell which is which.
- Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) — A login step that asks for a second proof of identity, like a code from your phone, on top of your password.
- Two-Way Sync — Keeping two systems matched so a change made in either one automatically updates the other.
- Type safety — A property of code that catches mismatched data, like treating text as a number, before the program runs.
- TypeScript — A version of JavaScript that adds type checking, catching common mistakes before the code ever runs in a browser.
- Typography — The craft of arranging type, choosing fonts, sizes and spacing, so text is easy to read and carries the right tone.
U
- UI Design — The work of designing the visual surface of an app or website, the buttons, screens, colours and layout people see and tap.
- Unattended Automation — Automation that runs entirely on its own, with no person watching or stepping in, often on a schedule or trigger.
- Unicode — A global standard that gives every character, in every language, a unique number so computers can store and show text consistently.
- Unit test — A small automated check that confirms one tiny piece of code does exactly what it is meant to do.
- Unit Testing — The practice of writing many small automated checks so each piece of code keeps working as the software changes.
- Unsupervised Learning — A way of training where a model finds patterns and groups in data on its own, without any labeled correct answers.
- Uptime monitoring — A service that constantly checks whether your website or app is online and alerts you the moment it goes down.
- URL — The full web address you type or click to reach a specific page or file on the internet.
- URL Structure — The logical way all the web addresses on a site are organised, named and nested into folders.
- Usability — How easily and efficiently people can use a product to get something done without confusion or frustration.
- Usability Testing — A method where you watch real people use your product to find out where they get stuck or confused.
- User Acceptance Testing (UAT) — The final check where real users confirm new software does what they actually need before it goes live.
- User Interface — The visual layer of a product, the screens, buttons and controls a person looks at and touches to make it work.
- User Interface & Experience — The combined craft of how a product looks and how it feels to use, often shortened to UI and UX.
- User Journey — The full path a person takes to reach a goal with your product, from first contact to the final action.
- Utility-first CSS — A styling approach where you build designs from many small single-purpose classes instead of writing custom CSS per component.
- UX Audit — A structured review of a product that finds the usability problems blocking your users from getting things done.
- UX Design — The practice of shaping how a product works and feels so people can reach their goal easily and without frustration.
V
- Validation — The process of checking that data entered into a system is correct and complete before it is accepted.
- Vector — A list of numbers that represents the meaning or features of something, so software can compare items by similarity.
- Vector Database — A database that stores text or images as numeric vectors so you can search by meaning instead of exact words.
- Vector Embedding — A list of numbers that captures the meaning of a word, sentence or image so a computer can compare it by similarity.
- Vector index — A data structure that lets a system search millions of vector embeddings for the closest matches in milliseconds.
- Vendor Lock-In — When switching away from a supplier becomes so costly or difficult that you are effectively stuck with them.
- Version control — A system that tracks every change to your code over time, so a team can work together and roll back mistakes safely.
- Vision model — An AI model that can look at images or video and describe, classify or answer questions about what it sees.
- Voice Assistant — Software you talk to that listens, understands your request and replies or acts, like Siri, Alexa or a phone helpline bot.
- Voice User Interface — A way of controlling a product by speaking to it and hearing spoken answers back, instead of tapping a screen.
- VPN — A service that creates an encrypted tunnel for your internet traffic, hiding it from anyone on the network in between.
- VS Code — A free, popular code editor from Microsoft that developers use to write, debug and manage software projects.
- Vue.js — A popular open-source JavaScript framework for building interactive website interfaces and web apps.
- Vulnerability scanning — An automated check that scans systems for known weaknesses, like outdated software or open ports, before attackers find them.
W
- WCAG — The international standard that defines how to make websites and apps usable for people with disabilities.
- Web Application — Interactive software you use through a browser, where you do real work rather than just read pages.
- Web Browser — The program you use to open and view websites, such as Chrome, Safari, Firefox or Edge.
- Web components — A browser standard for building reusable, self-contained interface elements that work in any framework.
- Web Design — The practice of planning and creating how a website looks, feels and works for the people who use it.
- Web Development — The work of building and maintaining everything that makes a website or web app run, from the visible pages to the code behind them.
- Web Page — A single document on the web with its own address that you view in a browser, like one page of a larger website.
- Web Scraping — Automatically pulling information from websites by reading the page like a browser would and saving the data.
- Web Server — Software that receives requests from browsers and sends back the web pages, images and data they ask for.
- Web Structure — The overall way a website's pages are organised and linked together so people and search engines can navigate it.
- Web-Based — Software you use through a web browser instead of installing it on your computer.
- Web3 Websites — Websites that connect to blockchain networks, letting users sign in and transact with a crypto wallet instead of a traditional account.
- Webhook — An automatic message one system sends to another the moment a specific event happens.
- Webhook Automation — Automation that starts the instant one app sends a webhook to another, so things happen in real time.
- Webhook signature — A coded stamp added to a webhook message that proves it really came from the sender and was not tampered with.
- Webhooks — Automatic messages one app sends to another the moment something happens, so systems react in real time instead of asking over and over.
- Website — A collection of connected web pages, grouped under one domain name, that people can visit in a browser.
- Website Development — The full process of designing, building and launching a website, from the first plan to a live, working site.
- Website Security Headers — Small instructions a server sends with each page that tell the browser how to behave more safely.
- WebSocket — A connection that stays open between a browser and a server so they can send messages to each other instantly, in both directions.
- Whitespace — The empty space between and around elements on a page that gives a design room to breathe and makes it easier to read.
- WHOIS — A public lookup that tells you who registered a domain name and when, along with its registration details.
- Widget — A small, self-contained piece of an interface that does one job, like a search box, a weather panel or a chat bubble.
- Wireframing — The act of sketching a simple, bare-bones layout of a page to plan structure and flow before any visual design is added.
- WordPress — A widely used content management system that lets you build and update a website without writing code for every change.
- WordPress Editor — The screen inside WordPress where you write and lay out your pages and posts using blocks of content.
- WordPress Theme — A ready-made design package that controls how a WordPress site looks, from layout and colours to fonts.
- WordPress Website — A website built and run on the WordPress platform, where you edit content through a dashboard instead of code.
- Workflow automation — Wiring your tools together so a series of routine steps runs on its own, without anyone copying data between apps by hand.
- Workflow Engine — The software that runs, tracks, and keeps each step of an automated process on course from start to finish.
- Workflow Orchestration — Coordinating multiple automated steps and systems so they run in the right order, at the right time, and recover when something breaks.
- Workspace (monorepo) — A way to group several related code projects inside one repository so they share tools and stay in sync.
- WPA — The security standard that encrypts the connection between your devices and a Wi-Fi network so others can't snoop on it.
- WPML — A WordPress plugin that turns a single site into a multilingual one, so every page and post can have translated versions.
- WYSIWYG — An editor where what you see on screen while typing matches what visitors will see on the published page.
X
- XHTML — A stricter version of HTML that follows XML rules, requiring every tag to be properly closed and nested.
- XML — A text format that wraps data in named tags so both people and software can read and exchange it reliably.
- XPath — A small query language for pinpointing exactly the parts you want inside an XML or HTML document.
Y
Z
- Z-Index — A CSS property that controls which overlapping elements appear in front of or behind others on a page.
- Zapier — A no-code tool that connects your apps and runs automated tasks between them, so a trigger in one app sets off actions in others.
- Zero trust — A security model that verifies every user and request individually, instead of trusting anyone just because they are inside the network.
- Zero-Code Development — Building software through visual tools and drag-and-drop instead of writing any programming code.
- Zero-shot prompting — Asking an AI model to do a task with only an instruction and no worked examples to copy from.
- ZIP — A common file format that bundles one or more files into a single, compressed package that is smaller and easier to share.
#
- .htaccess — A small configuration file on Apache web servers that controls things like redirects, access rules and URL handling per directory.
- .io Domain — A web domain ending in .io, popular with tech startups even though it originally belongs to the British Indian Ocean Territory.
- .NET — A free, open-source development platform from Microsoft for building web, desktop, mobile and cloud software.
- 301 Redirect — A permanent server instruction that sends visitors and search engines from an old URL to a new one.
- 302 Redirect — A temporary server instruction that forwards visitors to another URL while the original page keeps its standing.
- 404 Page — The page a website shows when a visitor asks for an address that does not exist.
- 500 Internal Server Error — A generic message a website shows when something broke on the server, not on the visitor's side.
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