Glossary of Tech Terms – The Tech Edvocate

FTP (File Transfer Protocol): A standard network protocol used for the transfer of computer files between a client and server on a computer network.

FOSS (Free and Open Source Software): Software that is both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way.

FPGA (Field-Programmable Gate Array): An integrated circuit designed to be configured by a customer or a designer after manufacturing.

Gateway: A node in a computer network, a key stopping point for data on its way to or from other networks.

GIF (Graphics Interchange Format): A bitmap image format that supports animations and uses a palette of up to 256 colors.

GNU: An extensive collection of free software, which can be used as an operating system or can be used in parts with other operating systems.

GPON (Gigabit Passive Optical Network): A fiber-optic telecommunications technology for delivering broadband network access to end-customers.

GPU (Graphics Processing Unit): A specialized electronic circuit designed to rapidly manipulate and alter memory to accelerate the creation of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display device.

Grep: A command-line utility for searching plain-text data sets for lines that match a regular expression.

Hadoop: An open-source software framework for storing data and running applications on clusters of commodity hardware.

Hash Function: Any function that can be used to map data of arbitrary size to fixed-size values.

HDMI (High-Definition Multimedia Interface): A proprietary audio/video interface for transmitting uncompressed video data and compressed or uncompressed digital audio data.

Hexadecimal: A positional numeral system with a radix, or base, of 16.

HIDS (Host-based Intrusion Detection System): An application that monitors and analyzes the internals of a computing system.

HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure): An extension of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol for secure communication over a computer network.

ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol): A supporting protocol in the Internet protocol suite.

IDE (Integrated Development Environment): A software application that provides comprehensive facilities to computer programmers for software development.

IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol): An Internet standard protocol used by email clients to retrieve email messages from a mail server over a TCP/IP connection.

Infotainment: A type of media which provides a combination of information and entertainment.

Ingress: The act of entering; in networking, it refers to traffic that enters a network or system.

IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second): A performance measurement used to characterize computer storage devices like hard disk drives (HDD), solid state drives (SSD), and storage area networks (SAN).

JDBC (Java Database Connectivity): An application programming interface for the programming language Java, which defines how a client may access a database.

JIT (Just-In-Time) Compilation: A way of executing computer code that involves compilation during execution of a program rather than before execution.

JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks): A collection of hard drives that have not been configured to act as a redundant array of independent disks (RAID) array.

JVM (Java Virtual Machine): An abstract computing machine that enables a computer to run a Java program.

Kerberos: A computer network authentication protocol that works on the basis of tickets to allow nodes communicating over a non-secure network to prove their identity to one another in a secure manner.

Kernel Panic: A safety measure taken by an operating system’s kernel upon detecting an internal fatal error in which it either cannot safely recover or cannot continue to run without causing major data loss.

KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine): A virtualization module in the Linux kernel that allows the kernel to function as a hypervisor.

KPI (Key Performance Indicator): A measurable value that demonstrates how effectively a company is achieving key business objectives.

LaTeX: A document preparation system for high-quality typesetting.

LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol): An open, vendor-neutral, industry standard application protocol for accessing and maintaining distributed directory information services over an Internet Protocol network.

Load Balancer: A device that acts as a reverse proxy and distributes network or application traffic across a number of servers.

Lossless Compression: A class of data compression algorithms that allows the original data to be perfectly reconstructed from the compressed data.

MAC Address (Media Access Control Address): A unique identifier assigned to a network interface controller for use as a network address in communications within a network segment.

Mainframe: A computer used primarily by large organizations for critical applications, bulk data processing, and high-volume transaction processing.

Malvertising: The use of online advertising to spread malware.

MIMO (Multiple-Input and Multiple-Output): A method for multiplying the capacity of a radio link using multiple transmission and receiving antennas to exploit multipath propagation.

NAT (Network Address Translation): A method of remapping one IP address space into another by modifying network address information in the IP header of packets while they are in transit across a traffic routing device.

NFC (Near Field Communication): A set of communication protocols that enable two electronic devices to establish communication by bringing them within 4 cm of each other.

NIDS (Network Intrusion Detection System): A system that tries to detect malicious activity such as denial of service attacks, port scans or attempts to crack into computers by monitoring network traffic.

NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express): A host controller interface and storage protocol created to accelerate the transfer of data between enterprise and client systems and solid-state drives over a computer’s high-speed Peripheral Component Interconnect Express bus.

OLED (Organic Light-Emitting Diode): A light-emitting diode in which the emissive electroluminescent layer is a film of organic compound that emits light in response to an electric current.

OOP (Object-Oriented Programming): A programming paradigm based on the concept of “objects”, which can contain data and code.

OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project): An online community that produces freely-available articles, methodologies, documentation, tools, and technologies in the field of web application security.

OCR (Optical Character Recognition): The electronic or mechanical conversion of images of typed, handwritten or printed text into machine-encoded text.

P2P (Peer-to-Peer): A distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads between peers.

PaaS (Platform as a Service): A category of cloud computing services that provides a platform allowing customers to develop, run, and manage applications without the complexity of building and maintaining the infrastructure.

Payload: The part of transmitted data that is the actual intended message.

PCI Express (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express): A high-speed serial computer expansion bus standard.

QoS (Quality of Service): The description or measurement of the overall performance of a service, particularly the performance seen by the users of the network.

Quantum Computing: The use of quantum-mechanical phenomena such as superposition and entanglement to perform computation.

Query Language: A computer language used to make queries in databases and information systems.

QWERTY: The most common modern-day keyboard layout for Latin script.

RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks): A storage technology that combines multiple disk drive components into a logical unit for the purposes of data redundancy and performance improvement.

RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol): A proprietary protocol developed by Microsoft which provides a user with a graphical interface to connect to another computer over a network connection.

Refactoring: The process of restructuring existing computer code without changing its external behavior.

RegEx (Regular Expression): A sequence of characters that define a search pattern.

SAAS (Software as a Service): A software licensing and delivery model in which software is licensed on a subscription basis and is centrally hosted.

SATA (Serial Advanced Technology Attachment): A computer bus interface that connects host bus adapters to mass storage devices such as hard disk drives, optical drives, and solid-state drives.

Scalability: The capability of a system, network, or process to handle a growing amount of work, or its potential to be enlarged to accommodate that growth.

SCSI (Small Computer System Interface): A set of standards for physically connecting and transferring data between computers and peripheral devices.

TCP (Transmission Control Protocol): One of the main protocols of the Internet protocol suite.

TDD (Test-Driven Development): A software development process that relies on the repetition of a very short development cycle.

Telnet: A protocol used on the Internet or local area networks to provide a bidirectional interactive text-oriented communication facility using a virtual terminal connection.

TIFF (Tagged Image File Format): A computer file format for storing raster graphics images.

UART (Universal Asynchronous Receiver/Transmitter): A computer hardware device for asynchronous serial communication in which the data format and transmission speeds are configurable.

UDP (User Datagram Protocol): One of the core members of the Internet protocol suite.

UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface): A specification that defines a software interface between an operating system and platform firmware.

UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply): An electrical apparatus that provides emergency power to a load when the input power source or mains power fails.

Virtualization: The act of creating a virtual (rather than actual) version of something, including virtual computer hardware platforms, storage devices, and computer network resources.

VLAN (Virtual LAN): Any broadcast domain that is partitioned and isolated in a computer network at the data link layer.

VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol): A methodology and group of technologies for the delivery of voice communications and multimedia sessions over Internet Protocol networks.

VPN (Virtual Private Network): Extends a private network across a public network and enables users to send and receive data across shared or public networks as if their computing devices were directly connected to the private network.

WAF (Web Application Firewall): A firewall that monitors, filters and blocks HTTP traffic to and from a web application.

WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communication): A free, open-source project that provides web browsers and mobile applications with real-time communication via simple application programming interfaces.

Wi-Fi: A family of wireless network protocols, based on the IEEE 802.11 family of standards, which are commonly used for local area networking of devices and Internet access.

WORM (Write Once Read Many): A data storage device in which information, once written, cannot be modified.

X.509: A standard defining the format of public key certificates.

XML (eXtensible Markup Language): A markup language that defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable.

XSS (Cross-Site Scripting): A type of computer security vulnerability typically found in web applications.

XSLT (eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformations): A language for transforming XML documents into other XML documents, or other formats such as HTML for web pages, plain text or XSL Formatting Objects.

YAML (YAML Ain’t Markup Language): A human-readable data-serialization language commonly used for configuration files and in applications where data is being stored or transmitted.

Yottabyte: A unit of digital information equal to one septillion bytes.

YAGNI (You Aren’t Gonna Need It): A principle of extreme programming that states a programmer should not add functionality until deemed necessary.

YARN (Yet Another Resource Negotiator): A resource management and job scheduling technology.

Zero-day: A computer-software vulnerability that is unknown to those who should be interested in mitigating the vulnerability.

Zettabyte: A unit of information equal to one sextillion bytes or 1,000 exabytes.

Zombie: A computer connected to the Internet that has been compromised by a hacker, computer virus or trojan horse and can be used to perform malicious tasks of one sort or another under remote direction.

ZFS (Zettabyte File System): A combined file system and logical volume manager designed by Sun Microsystems.

Agile: A set of practices for software development where requirements and solutions evolve through collaborative effort.

Blockchain: A system of recording information in a way that makes it difficult or impossible to change, hack, or cheat the system.

Cloud Computing: The delivery of different services through the Internet, including data storage, servers, databases, networking, and software.

Cryptography: The practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of third parties.

Data Science: An interdisciplinary field that uses scientific methods, processes, algorithms and systems to extract knowledge and insights from structured and unstructured data.

DevOps: A set of practices that combines software development and IT operations to shorten the systems development life cycle.

Edge Computing: A distributed computing paradigm that brings computation and data storage closer to the sources of data.

Ethereum: An open-source, blockchain-based, decentralized software platform used for its own cryptocurrency, ether.

Firewall: A network security system that monitors and controls incoming and outgoing network traffic based on predetermined security rules.

Hadoop: An open-source software framework used for distributed storage and processing of big data sets.

Internet of Things (IoT): The interconnection via the Internet of computing devices embedded in everyday objects, enabling them to send and receive data.

Kubernetes: An open-source container-orchestration system for automating application deployment, scaling, and management.

Machine Learning: A subset of artificial intelligence that provides systems the ability to automatically learn and improve from experience without being explicitly programmed.

Microservices: A software development technique that structures an application as a collection of loosely coupled services.

Neural Network: A series of algorithms that endeavors to recognize underlying relationships in a set of data through a process that mimics the way the human brain operates.

OAuth: An open standard for access delegation, commonly used as a way for Internet users to grant websites or applications access to their information on other websites but without giving them the passwords.

Quantum Cryptography: The science of exploiting quantum mechanical properties to perform cryptographic tasks.

Robotics: The branch of technology that deals with the design, construction, operation, and use of robots.

Serverless Computing: A cloud computing execution model in which the cloud provider runs the server, and dynamically manages the allocation of machine resources.

TensorFlow: An open-source software library for dataflow and differentiable programming across a range of tasks, developed by Google.

Unified Communications: The integration of enterprise communication services such as instant messaging, presence information, voice, mobility features, audio, web & video conferencing, fixed-mobile convergence, desktop sharing, data sharing, call control and speech recognition with non-real-time communication services such as unified messaging.

Wearable Technology: Smart electronic devices that can be worn on the body as implants or accessories.

5G: The fifth generation technology standard for broadband cellular networks.

Augmented Reality (AR): An interactive experience of a real-world environment where the objects that reside in the real world are enhanced by computer-generated perceptual information.

Biometrics: The measurement and statistical analysis of people’s unique physical and behavioral characteristics.

Chatbot: A computer program designed to simulate conversation with human users, especially over the Internet.

Docker: A set of platform as a service products that use OS-level virtualization to deliver software in packages called containers.

Encryption: The process of encoding information in such a way that only authorized parties can access it.

Fintech: Computer programs and other technology used to support or enable banking and financial services.

Gamification: The application of typical elements of game playing to other areas of activity, typically as an online marketing technique to encourage engagement with a product or service.

Hypervisor: Software, firmware or hardware that creates and runs virtual machines.

Immersive Technology: Technology that attempts to emulate a physical world through the means of a digital or simulated world.

JSON (JavaScript Object Notation): An open standard file format and data interchange format that uses human-readable text to store and transmit data objects.

Kotlin: A cross-platform, statically typed, general-purpose programming language with type inference.

Low-Code Development: A visual approach to software development that enables faster delivery of applications through minimal hand-coding.

Middleware: Software that provides common services and capabilities to applications outside of what’s offered by the operating system.

NoSQL: A class of database management systems that are non-relational and generally do not use SQL.

Open Source: Software with source code that anyone can inspect, modify, and enhance.

Progressive Web App (PWA): A type of application software delivered through the web, built using common web technologies including HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

Quantum Supremacy: The potential ability of quantum computing devices to solve problems that classical computers practically cannot.

Responsive Web Design: An approach to web design that makes web pages render well on a variety of devices and window or screen sizes.

Scrum: An agile framework for developing, delivering, and sustaining complex products.

Terraform: An open-source infrastructure as code software tool that provides a consistent CLI workflow to manage hundreds of cloud services.

UI/UX (User Interface/User Experience): The user interface is how a user interacts with a device or application, while user experience is the overall experience of a person using a product such as a website or computer application.

Virtual Reality (VR): A simulated experience that can be similar to or completely different from the real world.

WebAssembly: A binary instruction format for a stack-based virtual machine, designed as a portable target for compilation of high-level languages like C, C++, and Rust.

XaaS (Anything as a Service): A collective term said to stand for a number of things including “X as a service,” “anything as a service” or “everything as a service.”

Zero Trust Security: A security concept centered on the belief that organizations should not automatically trust anything inside or outside its perimeters and instead must verify anything and everything trying to connect to its systems before granting access.

Ansible: An open-source software provisioning, configuration management, and application-deployment tool.

Big Data: Extremely large data sets that may be analyzed computationally to reveal patterns, trends, and associations.

Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD): A method to frequently deliver apps to customers by introducing automation into the stages of app development.

Data Mining: The process of discovering patterns in large data sets involving methods at the intersection of machine learning, statistics, and database systems.

ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning): Business process management software that allows an organization to use a system of integrated applications to manage the business.

Fuzzy Logic: A form of many-valued logic in which the truth values of variables may be any real number between 0 and 1.

GraphQL: An open-source data query and manipulation language for APIs, and a runtime for fulfilling queries with existing data.

Hashing: The transformation of a string of characters into a usually shorter fixed-length value or key that represents the original string.

IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service): A form of cloud computing that provides virtualized computing resources over the internet.

Jenkins: An open source automation server which enables developers around the world to reliably build, test, and deploy their software.

Kafka: A distributed streaming platform that is used for building real-time data pipelines and streaming apps.

Load Testing: The process of putting demand on a software system or computing device and measuring its response.

Microcontroller: A small computer on a single integrated circuit containing a processor core, memory, and programmable input/output peripherals.

NLP (Natural Language Processing): A subfield of linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human language.

ORM (Object-Relational Mapping): A programming technique for converting data between incompatible type systems using object-oriented programming languages.

Penetration Testing: An authorized simulated cyberattack on a computer system, performed to evaluate the security of the system.

Quantum Bit (Qubit): The basic unit of information in quantum computing.

Redux: An open-source JavaScript library for managing application state.

Selenium: A portable framework for testing web applications.

Tensorflow: An open-source software library for dataflow and differentiable programming across a range of tasks.

Unit Testing: A software testing method by which individual units of source code are tested to determine whether they are fit for use.

Vue.js: An open-source model–view–viewmodel front end JavaScript framework for building user interfaces and single-page applications.

Web Scraping: A technique employed to extract large amounts of data from websites.

Xamarin: A Microsoft-owned software company founded in May 2011 that produces tools used for developing cross-platform mobile applications.

YAML (YAML Ain’t Markup Language): A human-readable data-serialization language commonly used for configuration files.

Zookeeper: A centralized service for maintaining configuration information, naming, providing distributed synchronization, and providing group services.

Agile Methodology: An approach to software development under which requirements and solutions evolve through the collaborative effort of self-organizing and cross-functional teams and their customer(s)/end user(s).

Blockchain: A growing list of records, called blocks, that are linked using cryptography.

Continuous Integration: The practice of merging all developers’ working copies to a shared mainline several times a day.

Data Warehouse: A system used for reporting and data analysis, and is considered a core component of business intelligence.

ETL (Extract, Transform, Load): The general procedure of copying data from one or more sources into a destination system which represents the data differently from the source(s).

Functional Programming: A programming paradigm that treats computation as the evaluation of mathematical functions and avoids changing-state and mutable data.

Git: A distributed version-control system for tracking changes in source code during software development.

Hadoop: An open-source software framework used for distributed storage and processing of dataset of big data using the MapReduce programming model.

Immutable Infrastructure: An approach to managing services and software deployments on IT resources wherein components are replaced rather than changed.

JavaScript: A high-level, interpreted programming language that conforms to the ECMAScript specification.

Kubernetes: An open-source container-orchestration system for automating application deployment, scaling, and management.

Lambda Function: A function that is passed as an argument to another function.

Microservices: A software development technique that structures an application as a collection of loosely coupled services.

Node.js: An open-source, cross-platform, JavaScript runtime environment that executes JavaScript code outside of a browser.

Object-Oriented Programming (OOP): A programming paradigm based on the concept of “objects”, which can contain data and code.

PostgreSQL: A free and open-source relational database management system emphasizing extensibility and SQL compliance.

Query Optimization: The process of selecting the most efficient query plan for a given query.

RESTful API: An application program interface (API) that uses HTTP requests to GET, PUT, POST and DELETE data.

Scala: A general-purpose programming language providing support for functional programming and a strong static type system.

TypeScript: A programming language developed and maintained by Microsoft. It is a strict syntactical superset of JavaScript and adds optional static typing to the language.

Unified Modeling Language (UML): A general-purpose, developmental, modeling language in the field of software engineering that is intended to provide a standard way to visualize the design of a system.

Vagrant: An open-source software product for building and maintaining portable virtual software development environments.

WebSocket: A computer communications protocol, providing full-duplex communication channels over a single TCP connection.

XML (eXtensible Markup Language): A markup language that defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable.

YAML: A human-readable data-serialization language commonly used for configuration files and in applications where data is being stored or transmitted.

Zero-day Exploit: A computer-software vulnerability that is unknown to, or unaddressed by, those who should be interested in mitigating the vulnerability.

Apache Spark: An open-source unified analytics engine for large-scale data processing.

Bash Scripting: A scripting language used by the GNU Bourne-Again Shell (Bash).

Continuous Deployment: A software engineering approach in which software functionalities are delivered frequently through automated deployments.

Data Lake: A centralized repository that allows you to store all your structured and unstructured data at any scale.

Elasticsearch: A distributed, open-source search and analytics engine for all types of data.

Functional Testing: A type of software testing that validates the software system against functional requirements/specifications.

GraphQL: A query language for APIs and a runtime for fulfilling those queries with your existing data.

Helm: The package manager for Kubernetes.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC): The process of managing and provisioning computer data centers through machine-readable definition files, rather than physical hardware configuration or interactive configuration tools.

JWT (JSON Web Token): A compact and self-contained way for securely transmitting information between parties as a JSON object.

Kafka Streams: A client library for building applications and microservices, where the input and output data are stored in Kafka clusters.

Load Balancing: The process of distributing network or application traffic across multiple servers.

MongoDB: A cross-platform document-oriented database program. Classified as a NoSQL database program, MongoDB uses JSON-like documents with optional schemas.

Nginx: A web server that can also be used as a reverse proxy, load balancer, mail proxy and HTTP cache.

OAuth 2.0: An authorization framework that enables applications to obtain limited access to user accounts on an HTTP service.

Prometheus: An open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit originally built at SoundCloud.

Queue: A collection of entities that are maintained in a sequence and can be modified by the addition of entities at one end of the sequence and the removal of entities from the other end of the sequence.

React Native: An open-source mobile application development framework created by Facebook.

Serverless Computing: A cloud computing execution model in which the cloud provider runs the server, and dynamically manages the allocation of machine resources.

Terraform: An open-source infrastructure as code software tool created by HashiCorp.

Unit Testing: A software testing method by which individual units of source code are tested to determine whether they are fit for use.

Vue.js: An open-source model–view–viewmodel JavaScript framework for building user interfaces and single-page applications.

WebAssembly: A binary instruction format for a stack-based virtual machine.

XSS (Cross-Site Scripting): A type of security vulnerability typically found in web applications.

YARN (Yet Another Resource Negotiator): A resource management and job scheduling technology.

Zookeeper: A centralized service for maintaining configuration information, naming, providing distributed synchronization, and providing group services.

Agile Scrum: An agile framework for developing, delivering, and sustaining complex products, with an initial emphasis on software development.

Blockchain Technology: A system of recording information in a way that makes it difficult or impossible to change, hack, or cheat the system.

Continuous Monitoring: An approach to technology and business systems management that ensures organizational and technology risks are effectively managed on an ongoing basis.

Data Visualization: The graphic representation of data.

Edge Computing: A distributed computing paradigm that brings computation and data storage closer to the location where it is needed.

Fuzzy Logic: A form of many-valued logic in which the truth values of variables may be any real number between 0 and 1.

Garbage Collection: Automatic memory management in programming languages.

Hyperledger: An umbrella project of open-source blockchains and related tools.

Immutable Infrastructure: An approach to managing services and software deployments on IT resources wherein components are replaced rather than changed.

Julia: A high-level, high-performance, dynamic programming language well-suited for computational science and numerical analysis.

Keras: An open-source neural-network library written in Python.

Latency: The delay before a transfer of data begins following an instruction for its transfer.

Microservices Architecture: An architectural style that structures an application as a collection of small autonomous services, modeled around a business domain.

Neural Network: A series of algorithms that endeavors to recognize underlying relationships in a set of data through a process that mimics the way the human brain operates.

OpenShift: A family of containerization software products developed by Red Hat.

Puppet: A software configuration management tool which includes its own declarative language to describe system configuration.

Quantum Computing: The use of quantum-mechanical phenomena such as superposition and entanglement to perform computation.

RabbitMQ: An open-source message-broker software that originally implemented the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol.

Selenium: A portable framework for testing web applications.

TensorFlow: An open-source software library for dataflow and differentiable programming across a range of tasks.

Unified Endpoint Management (UEM): A class of software tools that provide a centralized approach to managing and securing all of an organization’s endpoint devices.

Virtual Machine (VM): An emulation of a computer system.