Software Engineering Glossary

CRUD stands for Create, Read, Update, and Delete—the four basic operations that can be performed on data in most applications. These operations form the foundation of how users interact with databases and persistent storage: Create adds new records, Read retrieves existing data, Update modifies existing records, and Delete removes data.

CRUD is important because it provides a universal mental model for designing any data-driven application, serves as a framework for structuring APIs and database interactions consistently, and maps directly to HTTP methods (POST, GET, PUT/PATCH, DELETE) and SQL commands (INSERT, SELECT, UPDATE, DELETE). Understanding CRUD ensures engineers cover all essential functionality and creates a practical bridge between different layers of application architecture, making it fundamental to how data flows through software systems.

Django is a high-level Python web framework that helps developers build secure and scalable web applications quickly. It follows a 'batteries-included' philosophy, providing built-in features like user authentication, database management, admin panels, and form handling right out of the box. Django emphasizes security by default, automatically protecting against common vulnerabilities like SQL injection and cross-site scripting. People use it because it allows rapid development without sacrificing robustness, has excellent documentation, and is trusted by major sites like Instagram and Spotify for building everything from simple websites to complex web applications.

Docker is a software platform that packages applications and their dependencies into standardized, portable units called 'containers.' People use it because these containers guarantee that an application will run identically and consistently on any machine, eliminating the common 'it works on my machine' problem. This simplifies development, accelerates deployment, and makes it easy to build, share, and run applications securely anywhere.

Git is a free, open-source distributed version control system that tracks changes to files and code over time. It allows multiple developers to work on the same project simultaneously without overwriting each other's work, enabling them to create branches for new features, merge changes, and revert to previous versions if needed. Businesses use it because it efficiently handles projects of any size with fast performance, makes collaboration seamless across teams, and provides a complete history of all code changes for accountability and debugging. It's become the industry standard for software development and is essential for modern team-based coding workflows.

GitHub is a cloud-based platform built on top of Git that provides code hosting, collaboration tools, and project management features for software development teams. It allows developers to work together on projects, use management tools that sync with their work, and code from anywhere on a single integrated platform. Businesses use it because it includes AI-powered tools like GitHub Copilot for faster coding, built-in security features to find and fix vulnerabilities automatically, and collaboration features like pull requests, code reviews, and issue tracking that streamline the entire development workflow. It's essentially the social network and productivity hub for developers, making it easier to manage code, coordinate teams, and ship software efficiently.

htmx is a lightweight JavaScript library that gives developers access to AJAX, CSS transitions, WebSockets, and Server Sent Events directly in HTML using attributes, allowing them to build modern interactive user interfaces without heavy JavaScript frameworks. It's extremely small at around 14KB minified and gzipped, has no dependencies, and has been shown to reduce code base sizes by 67% when compared to React. Businesses use it because it dramatically simplifies web development by letting backend developers build dynamic applications using mostly HTML and server-side code, reducing complexity, maintenance burden, and the need for specialized frontend expertise. Instead of writing complex JavaScript, developers can add simple attributes like `hx-post` to HTML elements to make them interactive, making it faster and easier to ship features.

Hugging Face is a collaboration platform for machine learning where users can create, discover, and collaborate on AI models, datasets, and applications across all modalities including text, image, video, audio, and 3D. It hosts over 1 million AI models and 400,000+ applications, providing both free hosting for public projects and paid compute solutions for deployment. Businesses use it because it offers enterprise-grade security, access controls, optimized inference endpoints for deploying models, and a comprehensive open-source toolkit that accelerates AI development without having to build infrastructure from scratch. It's essentially the GitHub of the AI world, making it easy to find pre-trained models, share work, and rapidly prototype or deploy machine learning solutions.

JavaScript is a programming language that is a core technology of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. While HTML structures content and CSS styles it, JavaScript adds interactivity, allowing developers to create dynamic content, control multimedia, animate images, and much more. People use it to make websites and web applications responsive and engaging for users. Today

Large Language Models (LLMs) are AI systems trained on vast amounts of text data that can understand and generate human-like text, perform reasoning tasks, answer questions, write code, and assist with a wide variety of language-based tasks. They work by learning patterns in language during training and then using those patterns to predict and generate relevant responses based on the input they receive. Businesses use LLMs to help with customer support, content generation, document analysis, coding assistance, and data extraction, though these systems require oversight and work best as tools that augment rather than replace human judgment. They're valuable because they can handle certain repetitive language tasks at scale and provide a starting point for work that humans can refine, though they have limitations including occasional inaccuracies, biases in training data, and difficulty with tasks requiring deep reasoning or real-world understanding.

PostgreSQL is a powerful, open-source object-relational database system known for being one of the most advanced in the world. People and organizations use it to reliably store, manage, and protect their data for a vast range of applications, from small websites to large, complex analytics platforms. It is extremely popular because it is free, highly stable, and has a strong reputation for performance, security, and a robust set of features built over 35 years of active development.

Python is a high-level programming language that is designed to be easy to learn and read, allowing developers to work quickly and integrate systems effectively. People use it because of its remarkable versatility, which makes it a popular choice for a wide range of tasks. Its extensive set of libraries supports applications in web development, data science, automation, artificial intelligence, and scientific computing.

React is a JavaScript library developed by Facebook for building user interfaces, particularly for web applications. It uses a component-based architecture where developers break down UIs into reusable pieces, making code more organized and maintainable. React's key innovation is its virtual DOM, which efficiently updates only the parts of a webpage that actually change, resulting in fast and responsive applications. People use it because it's powerful yet flexible, has a massive ecosystem of tools and libraries, excellent documentation, and strong job market demand, making it one of the most popular choices for modern web development.

Tailwind CSS is a utility-first CSS framework that provides low-level utility classes, allowing developers to build completely custom designs directly in their HTML. Unlike component-based frameworks, it doesn't come with pre-designed UI elements. Businesses use Tailwind to rapidly build and prototype modern, responsive websites with a consistent design system. This utility-first approach speeds up development, makes maintenance easier, and automatically removes unused CSS for production, resulting in highly optimized, fast-loading sites.

TypeScript is a programming language developed by Microsoft that builds on JavaScript by adding optional static typing and other features. It helps developers catch errors during development rather than at runtime, making code more reliable and easier to maintain, especially in large applications. The TypeScript code compiles down to regular JavaScript, so it runs anywhere JavaScript does, but developers get benefits like better autocomplete, refactoring tools, and documentation through the type system. People use it because it makes working on complex codebases much safer and more productive while still leveraging the entire JavaScript ecosystem.

A Virtual Private Server (VPS) is a virtualized server that runs on shared physical hardware but operates as an independent, isolated machine with dedicated resources like CPU, RAM, and storage. It sits between shared hosting (where multiple users share all resources) and dedicated servers (where you rent an entire physical machine), offering a balance of affordability, control, and performance. Engineers use VPS for hosting applications, databases, and development environments because it provides root access for custom configurations, scalability to adjust resources as needs grow, and the ability to run multiple isolated projects on separate virtual servers. VPS is important because it gives engineers production-like environments for testing, cost-effective infrastructure for deploying applications without managing physical hardware, and the flexibility to install any software stack or tool they need.