Technical practice, explained.

A body of knowledge is a structured, published description of what practitioners in a field need to know and be able to do. It gi…

A certificate shows that you took part in a course or programme. A certification shows that you were assessed against a defined s…

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open protocol for connecting AI applications to tools and data sources in a standard way.…

Prompt injection is an attack in which text given to a language model contains instructions that the model follows instead of, or…

A software bill of materials (SBOM) is a machine-readable list of the components inside a piece of software, including their name…

Monitoring checks for problems you already know about, using predefined measurements and alerts. Observability is the ability to…

A service level indicator (SLI) is a measurement of how a service is doing, such as the share of requests that succeed. A service…

An operation is idempotent if doing it several times has the same effect as doing it once. This matters because networks fail: a…

CI/CD stands for continuous integration and continuous delivery (or deployment). Continuous integration means merging small chang…

Zero trust is a security approach that gives no request automatic trust because of where it comes from. Every access is checked a…

A vector database stores embeddings, which are lists of numbers that represent the meaning of text, images or other data, and fin…

Acceptance criteria describe when one particular story does what it should. The Definition of Done is a shared quality standard t…

Infrastructure as code (IaC) means describing servers, networks and cloud services in files that a tool applies, instead of build…

Kubernetes is an open-source system for running and managing containers across many machines. You tell it what you want running,…

A monolith is one deployable application, and microservices split a system into many small services that deploy independently. Ne…

DevSecOps means building security into the way software is developed and operated, instead of checking it at the end. Security ch…

An LLM hallucination is an answer that sounds confident and fluent but is wrong or invented, such as a citation that does not exi…

A context window is the maximum amount of text, measured in tokens, that a language model can consider in one request. It covers…

Trunk-based development is a way of working in which developers merge small changes into one shared main branch, the trunk, at le…

A feature flag is a switch in the code that turns a behaviour on or off without deploying again. It lets teams release code to pr…

In event-driven architecture, services communicate by publishing events, which are records that something happened, and other ser…

Caching stores a copy of data in a faster place so that repeat requests are answered without redoing the slow work. It improves s…

A circuit breaker is a resilience pattern that stops a service from repeatedly calling a dependency that is failing. After enough…

The principle of least privilege says that every person, program and service should have only the access it needs to do its job,…