Glossary
Every term the courses use, defined in one line and then in a paragraph. Written to be read out of order.
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Search first, then answer from what was found.
Retrieval-augmented generation: find relevant passages in trusted content, put them in the prompt, and have the model answer from them with citations. When results are bad the culprit is usually the search step, not the model.
See also Embedding, Grounding, Hallucination
A cap on how often you may call something.
A restriction on request frequency, signalled by a 429 status. Exists to keep one caller from consuming a shared service. Respect it by backing off rather than retrying immediately.
See also Status code, Retry, Exponential backoff
Where in the world your machines physically are.
The geographic location of a datacentre. Determines the unavoidable minimum latency for users, and where your data legally resides.
Turning content into pixels.
The browser converting HTML, CSS and JavaScript into a visible page. Server-side rendering does the first pass on the server so content exists in the HTML immediately rather than after scripts run.
An API style organised around things.
Endpoints named after resources (/users, /orders) with HTTP verbs saying what to do to them. Highly cacheable and easy to inspect. A rich screen may need several calls.
Trying again after a failure.
Reasonable for 5xx errors and network failures, pointless for 4xx. Must be paired with increasing delays and with idempotency, or it turns a lost response into a duplicate action.
See also Idempotency, Exponential backoff, Status code
Putting the previous version back.
The cheapest available response to a bad deploy and the correct first move in most incidents. Restores your code, not your data: deleted rows and sent emails do not come back.
One journey there and back across the network.
The unit that actually determines perceived speed. Eight sequential round trips is slow no matter how fast the connection, which is why chattiness matters more than bandwidth.
Calling a named function on another machine.
An API style where you invoke an action directly rather than modelling resources. With shared types, a contract break becomes a build error, which is why it suits an app talking to its own backend.
See also Server function, REST, API