Log

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• 01serendipity

  Finding something good without looking for it; happy accident.

  Meeting my cofounder was pure serendipity.

  Note · Often contrasted with luck you engineer.

• 02to double down

  To commit more strongly to a strategy or opinion.

  They doubled down on serverless after the first launch.

• 03caveat

  A warning or limitation; something to keep in mind.

  One caveat: this only works on HTTPS.

  Note · From Latin — literally 'let him beware'.

• 04nuanced

  Having subtle differences or shades of meaning; not black-and-white.

  The answer is more nuanced than a simple yes or no.

• 05boilerplate

  Standard reused text or code; generic template material.

  I skipped the legal boilerplate and read the pricing section.

• 06idempotent

  Safe to apply more than once — doing it twice has the same effect as once.

  PUT is idempotent; repeating the request won’t create duplicates.

• 07ubiquitous

  Seeming to be everywhere; very common.

  Smartphones are ubiquitous in cities now.

• 08pragmatic

  Focused on practical results rather than theory or ideals.

  We took a pragmatic shortcut to ship on time.

• 09trade-off

  A compromise where gaining one benefit means accepting a cost elsewhere.

  Smaller bundles are a trade-off: faster loads, but less room for dev ergonomics.

  Note · Often written tradeoff in US English.

• 10verbatim

  Word for word; exactly as said or written.

  I quoted the release notes verbatim in the changelog.

• 11incremental

  Happening in small steps; built up gradually.

  We made incremental improvements to LCP each week.

• 12orthogonal

  Independent; changing one thing doesn’t force changes in another.

  Auth and billing should be orthogonal concerns in the codebase.

• 13ephemeral

  Short-lived; not meant to last.

  Preview deployments are ephemeral — they vanish after the PR merges.

• 14to rubber duck

  To explain a problem out loud (even to an inanimate object) to spot the bug.

  I rubber-ducked the race condition and saw the missing await.

• 15latency

  Delay between a request and a response; how long you wait.

  Edge caching cut API latency from 200 ms to under 40 ms.

• 16throughput

  How much work or data is processed per unit of time.

  We optimized throughput on the worker by batching KV writes.

• 17graceful degradation

  A system keeps core value when parts fail, instead of breaking entirely.

  When the CDN hiccups, we show alt text — graceful degradation.

• 18straw man

  A weak version of an argument set up only to knock it down — not the real position.

  That critique was a straw man; nobody proposed storing passwords in localStorage.

• 19invariably

  Always; every time — without exception.

  After deploys, someone invariably asks whether we rolled back.