Glossary

Windows Control Panel Item: a DLL file that implements a Control Panel applet for system configuration (display, network, sound settings).

Canon Raw 2: Canon's proprietary RAW image format used in DSLR and mirrorless cameras prior to the CR3 format.

Canon Raw 3: Canon's current RAW image format based on the ISO Base Media File Format (ISOBMFF), used in newer Canon cameras.

Create, Read, Update, Delete: the four basic operations for persistent data storage. In web development, CRUD operations correspond to HTTP methods: POST (Create), GET (Read), PUT/PATCH (Update), and...

Certificate Signing Request: a message sent to a Certificate Authority to request the issuance of a digital certificate containing the public key and identity information.

Cross-Site Request Forgery: a type of web security vulnerability where an attacker tricks a user into performing unintended actions on a web application they're authenticated with. Protection involves...

Cascading Style Sheets: a style sheet language used to describe the presentation of a document written in HTML. CSS controls layout, colors, fonts, spacing, and responsive design behavior.

Native CSS variables defined with a double-dash prefix (--my-color) that can be reused throughout a stylesheet and modified dynamically with JavaScript. CSS Custom Properties enable theming, responsiv...

A two-dimensional CSS layout system that allows developers to create complex grid-based designs with rows and columns. CSS Grid provides precise control over placement, alignment, and sizing of elemen...

Comma-Separated Values: a plain text file format that uses commas to separate values in tabular data. It is the simplest and most widely used format for data exchange between applications.

Cue Sheet: a metadata file describing the track layout of a CD or disc image, specifying positions, gaps, and indexes.

A data constraint language for validating and defining configuration data. It unifies schema and data definition with validation.

A deployment strategy where a new version of an application is gradually rolled out to a small subset of users before being deployed to the entire infrastructure. This minimizes risk by allowing teams...

An HTML element (rel="canonical") that tells search engines which version of a page is the preferred one when duplicate or similar content exists at multiple URLs. Canonical URLs prevent duplicate con...

An extremely fast data interchange format and RPC system. Designed by the creator of Protocol Buffers v2 with zero-copy encoding and type-safe interfaces.

The manifest file for Rust projects, defining package metadata, dependencies, build configuration, and features for the Cargo build system.

A highly scalable, distributed NoSQL database designed to handle large amounts of data across many commodity servers with no single point of failure. Originally developed at Facebook, Cassandra provid...

A prompting technique that encourages language models to break down complex reasoning into intermediate steps before arriving at a final answer. Chain-of-thought prompting significantly improves perfo...

The discipline of experimenting on a system to build confidence in its ability to withstand turbulent conditions in production. By intentionally injecting failures (network latency, server crashes, re...

An AI-powered software application designed to simulate conversation with human users through text or voice interfaces. Modern chatbots leverage large language models to understand context, maintain c...