Developer terms, defined.
Practical definitions of the words developers actually use, with links to the tools that put them to work.
What is ASCII?
ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is a 7-bit character encoding standard that maps 128 characters — including English letters, digits, punctuation, and control codes — to numeric values.
What is Base64 Encoding?
Base64 is a binary-to-text encoding scheme that represents binary data as a string of ASCII characters, using a 64-character alphabet of letters, digits, plus, and slash.
What is bcrypt?
bcrypt is a password hashing function based on the Blowfish cipher that incorporates a salt and an adjustable cost factor, making brute-force attacks computationally expensive.
What is CI/CD?
CI/CD (Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery) is a set of practices that automate building, testing, and deploying code changes, enabling teams to ship software reliably and frequently.
What is CORS?
CORS (Cross-Origin Resource Sharing) is an HTTP-header-based mechanism that allows a server to indicate which origins other than its own are permitted to load its resources.
What is Cron?
Cron is a time-based job scheduler in Unix-like operating systems that runs commands or scripts automatically at specified intervals using a compact expression syntax.
What is a Content Security Policy (CSP)?
A Content Security Policy (CSP) is an HTTP response header that lets website owners control which resources the browser is allowed to load, mitigating cross-site scripting and data injection attacks.
What is CSV?
CSV (Comma-Separated Values) is a plain-text file format that stores tabular data using commas to separate fields and newlines to separate records.
What is DNS?
DNS (Domain Name System) is the hierarchical naming system that translates human-readable domain names like example.com into IP addresses that computers use to route network traffic.
What is Docker?
Docker is a platform that packages applications and their dependencies into lightweight, isolated containers that run consistently across any environment.
What is Git?
Git is a distributed version control system that tracks changes to files, enabling developers to collaborate on code, maintain history, and manage branches independently.
What is Hexadecimal (Hex)?
Hexadecimal (hex) is a base-16 number system that uses digits 0-9 and letters A-F, widely used in computing for representing binary data, colors, and memory addresses.
What are HTML Entities?
HTML entities are special character sequences that represent reserved or invisible characters in HTML, using named references like & or numeric codes like &.
What are HTTP Status Codes?
HTTP status codes are three-digit numbers returned by a server in response to a client's request, indicating whether the request succeeded, failed, or requires further action.
What is JSON?
JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a lightweight, text-based data interchange format that uses human-readable key-value pairs and arrays to structure data.
What is a JWT?
A JWT (JSON Web Token) is a compact, URL-safe token format that encodes a JSON payload with a cryptographic signature, used for authentication and secure data exchange between parties.
What is MD5?
MD5 (Message-Digest Algorithm 5) is a hash function that produces a 128-bit (16-byte) digest, commonly used for checksums and data verification but considered cryptographically broken.
What is Nginx?
Nginx is a high-performance web server, reverse proxy, and load balancer known for its low memory footprint and ability to handle tens of thousands of concurrent connections.
What is OAuth?
OAuth 2.0 is an authorization framework that allows third-party applications to access a user's resources on another service without exposing the user's credentials.
What is Regex (Regular Expressions)?
A regular expression (regex) is a sequence of characters that defines a search pattern, used for matching, extracting, and manipulating text in strings.
What is a REST API?
A REST API (Representational State Transfer Application Programming Interface) is an architectural style for web services that uses HTTP methods and URLs to perform operations on resources.
What is SHA-256?
SHA-256 is a cryptographic hash function from the SHA-2 family that produces a fixed 256-bit (32-byte) digest from any input, widely used for data integrity verification and digital signatures.
What is SSL/TLS?
SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) and TLS (Transport Layer Security) are cryptographic protocols that encrypt communication between clients and servers, forming the foundation of HTTPS.
What is URL Encoding?
URL encoding (percent-encoding) is a mechanism for encoding special characters in URLs by replacing them with a percent sign followed by their hexadecimal ASCII value.
What is UTF-8?
UTF-8 is a variable-width character encoding that can represent every Unicode code point, using one to four bytes per character, and is the dominant encoding on the web.
What is a UUID?
A UUID (Universally Unique Identifier) is a 128-bit identifier formatted as a 36-character string, designed to be unique across space and time without a central authority.
What is WebSocket?
WebSocket is a communication protocol that provides full-duplex, bidirectional communication between a client and server over a single, persistent TCP connection.
What is XML?
XML (Extensible Markup Language) is a markup language that defines rules for encoding structured documents using nested tags, attributes, and text content.
What is XPath?
XPath (XML Path Language) is a query language for selecting nodes and computing values from XML and HTML documents using path expressions.
What is YAML?
YAML (YAML Ain't Markup Language) is a human-readable data serialization format that uses indentation to represent structure, commonly used for configuration files and data exchange.