Glossary

57 terms, generated automatically from every article's frontmatter — never hand-maintained separately.

ABCDEFILMNOPRSTVW#

A

Abstraction
Hiding complexity behind a simpler interface — the core mental tool of all of computer science, from functions to operating systems.
From: What Computer Science Actually Is (and What It Isn't) (Guide)
Application log
From: Reading Windows Event Viewer Without Getting Lost (Guide)
Application pool
An isolated worker-process boundary in IIS that runs one or more web applications, separate from other application pools on the same server.
From: IIS Application Pools: What They Are and Why They Crash (Guide)
Authoritative nameserver
From: How DNS Resolution Actually Works (Guide)

B

Build artifact
From: What Is a CI/CD Pipeline, Really (Guide)

C

Certificate authority
From: TLS/SSL Handshake, Step by Step (Guide)
Certificate chain
The sequence of certificates from a site's own certificate up to a trusted root certificate authority, each one signed by the next, that a client verifies before trusting a connection.
From: TLS/SSL Handshake, Step by Step (Guide)
chmod
The command used to change a file or directory's permission bits (read, write, execute).
From: Linux File Permissions: chmod/chown Demystified (Guide)
chown
The command used to change a file or directory's owner and/or group.
From: Linux File Permissions: chmod/chown Demystified (Guide)
Cipher suite
From: TLS/SSL Handshake, Step by Step (Guide)
Cloud Run
A GCP service that runs stateless containers, automatically scaling from zero to many instances based on incoming traffic, without you managing the underlying servers.
From: Your First GCP Cloud Run Deployment (Lab)
Commit
A saved snapshot of the staged changes, with a message, forming one point in the project's history.
From: Git for a Real Website: The iamravi.com Workflow (Guide)
Container image
From: Your First GCP Cloud Run Deployment (Lab)
Continuous Deployment (CD)
Automatically shipping a change to production (or a staging environment) once it passes CI, without a manual deployment step.
From: What Is a CI/CD Pipeline, Really (Guide)
Continuous Integration (CI)
Automatically building and testing code every time it's changed, so integration problems are caught within minutes rather than discovered much later.
From: What Is a CI/CD Pipeline, Really (Guide)
Contributing factor
From: Root Cause Analysis: A Simple Framework (Guide)

D

Data structure
A way of organizing data in memory so that specific operations become efficient.
From: Data Structures & Algorithms: How to Actually Start (Guide)
DNS
Domain Name System — the distributed lookup service that translates human-readable hostnames into IP addresses.
From: How DNS Resolution Actually Works (Guide)

E

Environment variable
From: Secrets Management: Don't Commit That Password (Guide)
Event ID
A numeric identifier for a specific type of logged event, used to search or filter for a known, recurring pattern across servers.
From: Reading Windows Event Viewer Without Getting Lost (Guide)

F

Fast-forward merge
A merge where the target branch's history moves forward to match the source branch, with no new merge commit created — only possible when there's no divergent history to reconcile.
From: Git for a Real Website: The iamravi.com Workflow (Guide)
Five Whys
From: Root Cause Analysis: A Simple Framework (Guide)
force-with-lease
A safer variant of a force push that refuses to overwrite the remote branch if someone else has pushed to it since you last fetched.
From: Git for a Real Website: The iamravi.com Workflow (Guide)

I

Idempotent
An operation that produces the same result no matter how many times it's repeated — relevant to which HTTP methods are safe to retry.
From: HTTP Status Codes You'll Actually See in Production (Guide)

L

Layer isolation
From: Isolating "Is It the Network or the App?" (Troubleshooting Walkthrough)
Log correlation
From: Reading Logs Backwards: A Debugging Habit (Guide)

M

Metric
A numeric measurement recorded over time, like CPU usage or request count — good for trends and alerting, not for explaining a single specific failure.
From: Monitoring 101: Metrics, Logs, and Traces (Guide)

N

Normalization
A statistical adjustment applied when an exam is conducted across multiple slots, correcting for any difficulty difference between slots so no candidate is advantaged or disadvantaged by which slot they were assigned.
From: CAT Percentile Explained (Guide)

O

Observability
From: Monitoring 101: Metrics, Logs, and Traces (Guide)
Octal permission notation
From: Linux File Permissions: chmod/chown Demystified (Guide)

P

Percentile
A measure of standing relative to every other test-taker — a 99th percentile score means you scored higher than 99% of everyone who took the exam that year.
From: CAT Percentile Explained (Guide)
Pipeline stage
From: What Is a CI/CD Pipeline, Really (Guide)

R

Rapid-fail protection
From: IIS Application Pools: What They Are and Why They Crash (Guide)
Reactive vs. proactive
From: From Support Work to Systems Thinking (Career Advice)
Recursive query
From: How DNS Resolution Actually Works (Guide)
Recycling
From: IIS Application Pools: What They Are and Why They Crash (Guide)
Resolver
The component (often provided by your OS or ISP) that performs the actual multi-step DNS lookup on your behalf.
From: How DNS Resolution Actually Works (Guide)
Root cause
The underlying condition that, if changed, would have prevented the incident — as distinct from a contributing factor that merely made it worse or more likely.
From: Root Cause Analysis: A Simple Framework (Guide)

S

Scope creep
From: Your Capstone Project: Scoping It Right (Guide)
Secret
Any credential, key, token, or password that grants access to something — must never be committed to source control in plain text.
From: Secrets Management: Don't Commit That Password (Guide)
Sectional time limit
A fixed time allotted to each of CAT's three sections, which cannot be borrowed from another section.
From: CAT Exam Pattern (Guide)
Serverless
From: Your First GCP Cloud Run Deployment (Lab)
Staging area
Also called the index — a holding area where you list exactly which changes will go into the next commit.
From: Git for a Real Website: The iamravi.com Workflow (Guide)
System log
From: Reading Windows Event Viewer Without Getting Lost (Guide)

T

Terminal
A text-based interface for running commands directly, without a graphical menu.
From: Setting Up Your First Development Environment (Lab)
Time complexity
How an algorithm's cost grows as its input grows, described with Big-O notation.
From: Data Structures & Algorithms: How to Actually Start (Guide)
TITA
Type In The Answer — a non-MCQ question format in CAT where the candidate types a numeric or text answer directly, with no options to choose from.
From: CAT Exam Pattern (Guide)
TLS
Transport Layer Security — the protocol that encrypts data in transit between a client and server; the successor to the older, deprecated SSL protocol (the names are still used interchangeably in casual conversation).
From: TLS/SSL Handshake, Step by Step (Guide)
Trace
A record of a single request's full path through a system, including every service it touched and how long each step took.
From: Monitoring 101: Metrics, Logs, and Traces (Guide)
TTL
Time To Live — how long a DNS answer is allowed to be cached before it must be looked up again.
From: How DNS Resolution Actually Works (Guide)

V

Variable
A named box that holds a value your program can read and change while it runs.
From: Your First Program: Understanding Before Memorizing (Guide)
Version control
A system that records changes to files over time, so you can see history, undo mistakes, and collaborate without overwriting each other's work.
From: Why Git Matters Even as a Student (Guide)

W

Worker process (w3wp.exe)
The actual Windows process that runs your application's code inside an application pool; it can be recycled or crash independently of IIS itself.
From: IIS Application Pools: What They Are and Why They Crash (Guide)
Working tree
The actual files on disk in your project folder, as you see and edit them right now.
From: Git for a Real Website: The iamravi.com Workflow (Guide)
Worktree
A second working directory attached to the same repository, checked out to a different branch, so you can work on two branches at once without stashing or switching.
From: Git for a Real Website: The iamravi.com Workflow (Guide)

#

502 Bad Gateway
From: HTTP Status Codes You'll Actually See in Production (Guide)
504 Gateway Timeout
From: HTTP Status Codes You'll Actually See in Production (Guide)

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