Coders Lingo — Word of the Day

Strangler Fig Pattern (Software Architecture)

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

/ˈstræŋɡlər fɪɡ ˈpætən/

A migration pattern where new functionality is built around an existing system, gradually replacing it.

"We strangler-figged the legacy billing — new features go to the new service; old ones migrate one by one."

CAP Theorem (Software Architecture)

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

/kæp ˈθɪərəm/

A theorem stating distributed systems can guarantee at most two of three properties: Consistency, Availability, Partition tolerance.

"We chose AP for the shopping cart — it stays available during a partition, accepting eventual consistency."

Domain-Driven Design (Software Architecture)

Fri, 15 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

/dəˈmeɪn ˈdrɪvən dɪˈzaɪn/

A software design approach modelling the system around the real-world business domain and its language.

"In DDD, the 'Order' aggregate owns its own consistency boundary — no external service modifies it directly."

Event-Driven Architecture (Software Architecture)

Thu, 14 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

/ɪˈvent ˈdrɪvən ˈɑːkɪtektʃər/

A design where services communicate by producing and consuming events through a message broker.

"When an order is placed, we emit 'order.created' — inventory, billing, and shipping each consume it independently."

CQRS (Software Architecture)

Wed, 13 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

/siː kjuː ɑː es/

Command Query Responsibility Segregation — separating write operations (commands) from read operations (queries).

"Commands update the write model; queries read from a denormalised read model — allows independent scaling."

Circuit Breaker (Software Architecture)

Tue, 12 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

/ˈsɜːkɪt ˈbreɪkər/

A pattern that detects failures in service calls and temporarily stops sending requests to an unhealthy service.

"After 5 consecutive timeouts, the circuit opens — calls fail fast for 30 seconds, then retry a probe."

Microservices (Software Architecture)

Mon, 11 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

/ˈmaɪkrəʊˈsɜːvɪsɪz/

An architectural style where an application is composed of small, independently deployable services communicating over APIs.

"Splitting the monolith lets us scale the recommendation engine independently during peak traffic."

Coupling (Software Architecture)

Sun, 10 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

/ˈkʌplɪŋ/

The degree to which software components depend on each other — lower coupling means components can change without affecting others.

"Payment was tightly coupled to orders — we refactored to event publishing, reducing coupling dramatically."

Data Leakage (Data Science & ML)

Sat, 09 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

/ˈdeɪtə ˈliːkɪdʒ/

Using information in model training that would not be available at prediction time, causing inflated performance metrics.

"We included the total at checkout in training — it's derived from items bought, so it leaks the target label."

Feature Engineering (Data Science & ML)

Fri, 08 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

/ˈfiːtʃər ˌendʒɪˈnɪərɪŋ/

The process of transforming raw data into informative input features that improve model performance.

"Extracting day-of-week from a timestamp was the key feature — the model's AUC jumped from 0.71 to 0.85."

Cross-validation (Data Science & ML)

Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

/krɒs ˌvælɪˈdeɪʃən/

A technique splitting data into k folds and training/evaluating k times to get a robust performance estimate.

"5-fold cross-validation gives five accuracy scores — we report the mean and standard deviation, not just one split."

Model Drift (Data Science & ML)

Wed, 06 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

/ˈmɒdəl drɪft/

The degradation of a model's accuracy over time as real-world data patterns diverge from its training distribution.

"Our fraud model drifted after new payment methods launched — we retrain monthly to keep accuracy above 95%."

Precision vs Recall (Data Science & ML)

Tue, 05 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

/prɪˈsɪʒən vɜːsəs rɪˈkɔːl/

Precision measures correctness of positive predictions; recall measures how many actual positives were found.

"High recall, low precision: we catch all fraudulent transactions but flag too many legitimate ones."

Hyperparameter (Data Science & ML)

Mon, 04 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

/ˈhaɪpərˌpærəmɪtər/

A configuration value set before training (learning rate, batch size, layer count) that controls the training process.

"We tuned the learning rate hyperparameter from 0.01 to 0.001 — validation loss improved consistently."

Hallucination (Data Science & ML)

Sun, 03 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

/həˌluːsɪˈneɪʃən/

When an LLM generates plausible-sounding but incorrect or fabricated information not grounded in its training data.

"The model hallucinated a non-existent citation — always validate LLM outputs against authoritative sources."

RAG (Data Science & ML)

Sat, 02 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

/ræɡ/

Retrieval-Augmented Generation — augmenting LLM prompts with relevant retrieved documents to ground responses in facts.

"Our support bot uses RAG — it fetches relevant KB articles and adds them to the prompt before answering."

Embeddings (Data Science & ML)

Fri, 01 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

/ɪmˈbedɪŋz/

Dense vector representations of data (text, images) that capture semantic meaning, enabling similarity search.

"We store document embeddings in a vector database — semantic search finds related articles by cosine similarity."

Inference (Data Science & ML)

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

/ˈɪnfərəns/

The process of running new input data through a trained model to generate predictions.

"Inference latency matters for our real-time API — the model must respond in under 200ms per request."

Overfitting (Data Science & ML)

Wed, 29 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

/ˌəʊvəˈfɪtɪŋ/

When an ML model learns training data too precisely — including noise — and fails to generalise to new examples.

"99% training accuracy but 62% on the test set — classic overfitting. We added dropout and reduced model complexity."

Social Engineering (Cybersecurity)

Tue, 28 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

/ˈsəʊʃəl ˌendʒɪˈnɪərɪŋ/

Manipulating people into divulging information or performing actions that compromise security.

"The attacker called the helpdesk pretending to be IT support and got a password reset — social engineering, not hacking."

OWASP Top 10 (Cybersecurity)

Mon, 27 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

/ˈəʊwæsp tɒp ten/

A widely referenced list of the most critical web application security risks, updated periodically by OWASP.

"Every release includes an OWASP review — we run a checklist against broken access control, injection, and IDOR."

SIEM (Cybersecurity)

Sun, 26 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

/siːm/

Security Information and Event Management — a system collecting and analysing security logs to detect threats in real time.

"The SIEM correlated 12 failed logins from the same IP with a successful one 3 minutes later — alerted the SOC."

Encryption (Cybersecurity)

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

/ɪnˈkrɪpʃən/

The process of encoding data so only authorised parties can read it, using symmetric or asymmetric algorithms.

"All data is encrypted at rest (AES-256) and in transit (TLS 1.3) — raw text never touches the wire or disk."

Penetration Testing (Cybersecurity)

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

/ˌpenɪˈtreɪʃən ˈtestɪŋ/

An authorised simulated cyberattack to identify and exploit vulnerabilities before real attackers do.

"The pen test team found an IDOR vulnerability in our API — they could fetch any user's data by changing the ID."

SQL Injection (Cybersecurity)

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

/es kjuː el ɪnˈdʒekʃən/

An attack where malicious SQL is inserted into a query via unsanitised user input, allowing data theft or modification.

"Never concatenate user input into SQL — use parameterised queries or an ORM to prevent SQL injection."

CVE (Cybersecurity)

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

/siː viː iː/

Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures — a public list of security vulnerabilities with unique identifiers (CVE-2024-12345).

"CVE-2024-3094 was the XZ Utils backdoor — check your packages for known CVEs with npm audit or trivy."

Principle of Least Privilege (Cybersecurity)

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

/ˈprɪnsɪpəl əv liːst ˈprɪvɪlɪdʒ/

A security practice granting users and services only the minimum permissions needed for their specific function.

"The Lambda only needs read access to S3 — granting it full S3 admin would violate least privilege."

MFA (Cybersecurity)

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

/em ef eɪ/

Multi-Factor Authentication — requiring two or more verification factors (password + OTP, passkey, etc.) to prove identity.

"All admin accounts require MFA — knowing the password alone isn't enough to access production."

Zero Trust (Cybersecurity)

Sun, 19 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

/ˈzɪərəʊ trʌst/

A security model assuming no user or system is trusted by default — every request must be authenticated and authorised.

"Zero trust means even internal service-to-service calls require mTLS — being inside the network isn't enough."

CSRF (Cybersecurity)

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

/siː es ɑː ef/

Cross-Site Request Forgery — an attack forcing a user's browser to make unintended requests using their active session.

"The fund transfer button was CSRF-vulnerable — an attacker's page could POST to it while the user was logged in."