Agile & Scrum
Sprint, backlog, velocity, retrospective, epic, story points — the vocabulary every team member hears daily.
Vocabulary
IT vocabulary organised by topic — terms your team actually uses in code reviews, documents, and daily conversation. Each module builds on the previous one.
✓ You’ve studied 0 terms across all modules
📅 Word of the Day —
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Learning paths by role
Start with the modules most relevant to your role — then expand from there.
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JavaScript & TypeScript
Closure, Promise, type narrowing, generics, destructuring — core JS/TS vocabulary for code reviews and architecture discussions.
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DevOps & Cloud
Pipeline, artifact, blue-green deployment, IaC, SLO, error budget — the vocabulary of cloud-native engineering.
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CSS & Frontend Architecture
Specificity, BEM, CSS custom properties, Flexbox vs Grid, utility classes — concepts behind every frontend code review.
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Git & Version Control
Commit, rebase, cherry-pick, bisect, detached HEAD, interactive rebase — 30 terms every developer discusses.
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Cloud Infrastructure
VPC, load balancer, auto-scaling, CDN, availability zone, managed service — AWS, GCP, and Azure vocabulary.
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Databases & SQL
Index, transaction, ACID, N+1 query, query plan, normalisation — vocabulary for backend engineers and data engineers.
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Cybersecurity
Threat model, attack surface, CVE, zero-day, OWASP, principle of least privilege — security vocabulary for all engineers.
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API Design
REST, GraphQL, idempotency, pagination, rate limiting, versioning — vocabulary for anything that communicates over HTTP.
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Data Science & ML
Feature, training data, overfitting, precision vs recall, pipeline, inference — vocabulary for ML engineers and data scientists.
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Software Architecture
Microservices, event-driven, CQRS, domain model, coupling, cohesion — vocabulary for system design and architecture discussions.
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Soft Skills for IT
Escalation, stakeholder, trade-off, alignment, pushback, scope creep — the vocabulary behind team communication and project management.
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IT Fundamentals
Hardware, software, server, client, bug, deploy, production — the core terms every IT professional must know before anything else.
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Networking & Protocols
IP address, DNS, TCP/UDP, TLS, load balancer, CDN, WebSocket, HTTP status codes — vocabulary for every engineer who touches the web.
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Linux & Command Line
Shell, daemon, pipe, process, signal, cron, permission, SSH, symlink — the vocabulary you need to navigate any terminal confidently.
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Data Structures & Algorithms
Array, linked list, hash map, Big O notation, recursion, binary search, DFS, dynamic programming — interview-ready CS vocabulary.
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UI/UX Design
Wireframe, mockup, prototype, user flow, WCAG, design system, CTA, skeleton screen, affordance — vocabulary for developers working with design teams.
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Testing & QA
Unit test, integration test, mock, stub, TDD, regression, flaky test, test pyramid, load test — vocabulary for quality-focused engineers.
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Mobile Development
Native app, deep link, APK, push notification, cold start, code signing, OTA update, haptic feedback — iOS and Android vocabulary.
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Agile & Lean
Kanban, WIP limit, lean, MVP, cycle time, lead time, OKRs, SAFe, definition of ready, flow efficiency — advanced agile vocabulary.
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Developer Tooling
IDE, debugger, linter, formatter, package manager, profiler, REPL, breakpoint, hot reload, dotfiles — vocabulary for your daily workflow.
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Open Source & Community
License, fork, maintainer, CONTRIBUTING.md, SemVer, upstream, bus factor, RFC, hackathon — vocabulary for contributing to open source.
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AI Agents & Agentic Systems
Agent loop, ReAct pattern, tool calling, multi-agent orchestration, guardrails, memory types — vocabulary for building autonomous AI systems.
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Event-Driven Architecture
Domain events, CQRS, event sourcing, saga patterns, choreography vs orchestration, schema registry — EDA vocabulary for distributed systems engineers.
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GraphQL Advanced
SDL, resolvers, DataLoader, N+1 problem, schema federation, Apollo Federation, persisted queries — advanced vocabulary for GraphQL API development.
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Cloud Migration Strategy
The 6Rs (rehost, replatform, refactor, repurchase, retire, retain), migration waves, landing zones, cutover windows, and TCO analysis vocabulary.
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Distributed Systems Consensus
Raft, quorum, linearizability, split-brain, leader fencing, CAP and PACELC theorems, vector clocks, and distributed transaction vocabulary.
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Security Architecture
Threat modeling, STRIDE, PASTA, attack trees, trust boundaries, zero trust, defense-in-depth, compensating controls, and security design review vocabulary.
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SOC & Security Operations
SIEM, alert triage and enrichment, IOC vs IOA, threat hunting, TTP, SOAR playbooks, STIX/TAXII threat intelligence vocabulary for blue team engineers.
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Technical Due Diligence
Architecture scorecards, tech debt quantification, scalability risk, vendor lock-in assessment, code health reports, risk registers, and RAG scoring vocabulary.
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Multi-Tenant SaaS Architecture
Tenant isolation models (pool, silo, bridge), noisy-neighbour mitigation, control plane vs. data plane, SaaS tiers, entitlement services, and onboarding pipeline vocabulary.
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Code Quality Metrics
Cyclomatic complexity, cognitive complexity, DORA metrics, ISO 25010 quality model, tech debt ratio, SonarQube indicators, code churn, and static analysis vocabulary.
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Low-Code Platform Vocabulary
Citizen developer model, canvas apps vs. model-driven apps, connectors, Power Automate flows, Center of Excellence governance, DLP policies, and ALM for low-code vocabulary.
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Embedded Systems & RTOS
Real-time operating system concepts, task scheduling, interrupt service routines, HAL and BSP layers, MISRA C safety coding, bare-metal vs. OS approaches, and firmware vocabulary.
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Platform Product Management
Platform as product, developer NPS, golden paths, Team Topologies vocabulary, platform adoption funnel, OKRs for platform teams, dogfooding, and platform-specific communication.
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Incident Command & Response
ICS roles (Incident Commander, Operations Lead, Comms Lead, Scribe), SEV declaration, assuming command, incident timeline, standing down, and post-mortem vocabulary.
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ML Platform & MLOps Tools
Feature stores, experiment tracking, model registries, drift detection, ONNX serialisation, training-serving skew, shadow mode, and ML infrastructure vocabulary.
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Data Governance Vocabulary
Data catalog, data lineage, data stewardship, data quality dimensions, governance policy language, GDPR data management vocabulary, and compliance communication.
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AI Alignment & Safety
RLHF, reward modelling, Constitutional AI, red-teaming, jailbreak, prompt injection, scalable oversight, corrigibility, hallucination, and responsible AI vocabulary.
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Identity & Access Management
OAuth 2.0 flows, OIDC, SAML assertions, JWT claims, RBAC, ABAC, and IAM platform vocabulary for secure authentication and authorisation.
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Search Engineering
Elasticsearch vocabulary: inverted index, shards, query DSL, relevance scoring (BM25), analyzers, dense vector search, and operational concepts.
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Feature Flags & Experimentation Platform
LaunchDarkly, Unleash, feature toggle vocabulary: targeting rules, segments, rollout strategies, kill switches, and client-side vs. server-side evaluation.
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Database Schema Design
ER modelling, normalisation forms (1NF–3NF), star and snowflake schemas, indexing vocabulary, constraint types, and schema design discussion language.
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Applied Cryptography
Symmetric and asymmetric encryption, TLS 1.3 handshake, PKI and certificate vocabulary, key management, HSMs, and common cryptographic threat vocabulary.
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Privacy Engineering
PII classification, pseudonymisation, GDPR technical implementation (DSAR, right to erasure), consent management, data minimisation, and privacy-by-design vocabulary.
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Recommendation Systems
Collaborative filtering, content-based filtering, matrix factorisation, cold start, evaluation metrics (NDCG, MAP), candidate generation, and ranking pipeline vocabulary.
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Build & Release Engineering
Artifact management, SemVer, release trains, hotfix vocabulary, build reproducibility, changelog generation, and release pipeline automation.
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Developer Tools Engineering
LSP, DAP, tree-sitter grammar vocabulary, VS Code extension API concepts, static analysis (AST, lint rules), and developer experience tooling.
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Monorepo & Build Systems
Turborepo, Nx, Bazel vocabulary: pipeline caching, affected commands, workspace management, hermetic builds, and trunk-based development in monorepos.
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API Contract Testing
Consumer-driven contract testing with Pact: pact files, provider verification, can-i-deploy, provider states, and CI/CD integration for microservice APIs.
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ML Model Serving & Inference
Model serving vocabulary: inference endpoints, quantisation, GPU inference, shadow deployment, prediction drift monitoring, and champion/challenger patterns.
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Service Mesh — Advanced Operations
Istio and Envoy vocabulary: data plane, control plane, VirtualService, DestinationRule, mTLS, circuit breaker in mesh, ambient mode, and service mesh observability.
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WebRTC & Real-Time Communication
WebRTC API vocabulary: RTCPeerConnection, SDP, ICE candidates, STUN/TURN, simulcast, CRDT for real-time collaboration, and SFU vs. MCU architectures.
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Staff+ Engineering Influence & Communication
RFC authoring, ADR vocabulary, technical strategy, cross-org alignment, influence without authority, and executive communication vocabulary for senior engineers.
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Localization Engineering
Localization technical vocabulary: XLIFF, ICU MessageFormat, translation memory, TMS integration, pseudo-localisation, continuous localisation pipelines, and LQA.
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Advanced Post-Incident Review
Blameless postmortem culture, contributing factors, timeline reconstruction, corrective vs. preventive actions, psychological safety, and SRE postmortem document structure.
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Git — Advanced Operations
Interactive rebase, cherry-pick, reflog, bisect, stash, worktree, rerere, and sparse checkout — advanced Git for senior developers.
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SQL — Window Functions & Query Plans
Window functions (OVER, PARTITION BY, ROW_NUMBER, LAG/LEAD), CTEs, recursive CTEs, EXPLAIN ANALYZE, LATERAL joins, and materialized views.
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React & Next.js Ecosystem
React Server Components, useCallback vs useMemo, Suspense, startTransition, Server Actions, SWR, React Query, hydration, and Turbopack.
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Monitoring & Alerting
Prometheus metric types (counter/gauge), PromQL rate(), AlertManager silence, escalation policies, on-call acknowledge/resolve, MTTR, and alert fatigue.
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Browser DevTools
TTFB, flame charts, long tasks, retained vs shallow size, stalled requests, coverage panel, CLS, paint flashing, memory leaks — Chrome DevTools vocabulary.
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Database Migrations
Up/down migrations, migration history tables, repeatable migrations, baseline, migration conflicts, checksum validation, and non-destructive migration strategy.
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Kubernetes Operators & CRDs
Custom Resource Definitions, operator pattern, reconciliation loop, desired vs actual state, mutating and validating webhooks, Kubebuilder, controller-runtime.
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Chaos Engineering
Fault injection, blast radius, game-day vocabulary, hypothesis design, steady-state, and chaos experiment methodology.
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Product Design Language
Design systems, component tokens, Figma handoff, accessibility in design, design debt, and design-engineering collaboration vocabulary.
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Green Software & Sustainability
Carbon intensity, carbon-aware workloads, Scope 1/2/3 emissions, SCI (Software Carbon Intensity), GreenOps, and right-sizing for energy efficiency.
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Software Supply Chain Security
SBOM, SLSA levels, provenance, attestation, hermetic builds, Sigstore, cosign, dependency confusion, and artifact digest verification.
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Spatial Computing & XR
visionOS, passthrough, mixed reality, immersive space, ARKit, RealityKit, hand tracking, eye gaze input, and spatial audio vocabulary.
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Synthetic Data & RLHF
Synthetic data generation, data augmentation, differential privacy, utility-privacy trade-off, fidelity metrics, and synthetic test data management.
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Prompt Engineering
System prompt design, few-shot learning, chain-of-thought (CoT), temperature/top-p, prompt chaining, prompt injection defense, and prompt versioning.
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Progressive Delivery
Feature flags, canary deployments, blue-green deployments, ring-based rollouts, rollback triggers, traffic splitting, and kill switches.
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Developer Portal Vocabulary
Backstage, software catalog, tech radar, scaffolder templates, portal scorecards, catalog governance, and developer portal adoption metrics.
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Knowledge Graphs & Graph Databases
Nodes, edges, Cypher, Gremlin, SPARQL, RDF, OWL ontologies, knowledge graph embeddings, semantic web, and entity resolution.
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Developer Experience Metrics
SPACE framework, Developer Effectiveness Index, flow state, cognitive load, DX surveys, friction logs, onboarding metrics, and DX ROI language.
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AI Model Evaluation
MMLU, HumanEval, model cards, Chatbot Arena, eval-as-code, LLM-as-judge, human evaluation protocols, and benchmark saturation vocabulary.
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Multi-Region Deployment
Active-active vs active-passive topology, failover, geodistribution, global load balancing, RPO/RTO in multi-region context, blast radius containment.
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Data Lineage & Cataloging
Lineage graph, column-level lineage, data catalog, DataHub/Atlan, data stewardship, GDPR erasure via lineage, and impact analysis vocabulary.
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Cloud Platform Economics
Reserved instances, spot/preemptible instances, rightsizing, cost allocation tags, showback vs chargeback, unit economics, and egress cost vocabulary.
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Technical Content Creation
Tutorial structure, screencast vocabulary, CFP/talk abstract writing, engineering blog post vocabulary, and technical SEO for developer content.
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API Monetization
API-as-a-product, rate limiting tiers, usage-based billing, API marketplace, overage charges, and API developer experience vocabulary.
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DevSecOps Pipeline
SAST/DAST/IAST, security gates, secret scanning, container image scanning, vulnerability remediation SLA, and compliance-as-code vocabulary.
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Quantum Error Correction
Physical vs logical qubits, surface code, fault-tolerant quantum computing, magic state distillation, topological qubits, and threshold theorem.
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Developer Productivity ROI
Engineering effectiveness vocabulary for leadership conversations: productivity multipliers, DX ROI framing, DORA benchmarks, and engineering investment language.
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API Developer Experience
Time-to-first-successful-call, onboarding friction, API sandbox, documentation quality, SDK ergonomics, error message quality, and API changelog vocabulary.
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Networking Fundamentals
OSI layers, TCP/IP model, DNS resolution, HTTP/HTTPS, load balancing, CDN, NAT, and subnetting vocabulary for developers.
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Roadmaps & OKRs
OKR framework, confidence scores, RICE prioritisation, MoSCoW, Now/Next/Later roadmaps, descoping, bets, and strategic initiatives.
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Platform Engineering
IDP, golden path, paved road, stream-aligned teams, DORA metrics, cognitive load reduction, toil, and SPACE framework for developer productivity.
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Microservices Patterns
Circuit breaker, saga, outbox pattern, strangler fig, bounded context, idempotent consumer, anti-corruption layer, and compensating transactions.
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Cloud Security
Zero-trust architecture, IAM, CASB, SIEM, DLP, WAF, CSPM, secrets management, and the essential security vocabulary for cloud-native IT professionals.
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Kubernetes & Container Orchestration
Pod, Deployment, Service, Ingress, CRD, Operator, HPA, StatefulSet, Helm, and the essential vocabulary for running containerised workloads in Kubernetes.
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Machine Learning Engineering
Training loop, inference, feature engineering, gradient descent, overfitting, A/B testing, SHAP values, MLOps, and vocabulary for ML engineers in production.
Keep Learning
Exercise Vocabulary Quizzes
Test yourself on the terms you've just studied — multiple choice, fill-in-blank, and matching.
Start quizzes → Exercise Collocations — 100+ PairsGo beyond single words: "merge a branch", "raise a PR", "ship a feature" — the pairs that matter.
Practice now → Blog Vocabulary Deep-DivesIn-depth articles on DevOps English, Agile vocabulary, API terminology, and more.
Read articles → Exercise Pronunciation Drillscache, nginx, kubectl, PostgreSQL — say the words you're now studying with confidence.
Start drills →