The words, without the shrug

Turning source code into something runnable.

Compiling, bundling and optimising your source into deployable output. A failed build is good news, because the pipeline caught a problem before any user did.

See also Deploy, CI/CD

The agreed shape of messages between systems.

What each side promises the other about requests and responses. Exists whether or not anyone wrote it down. Shared types turn a broken contract into a build error instead of a production incident.

See also API, Breaking change

Making new code live.

Build, upload, switch traffic, verify. During the switch two versions run simultaneously, which is why changes must be able to coexist with their predecessor for a few seconds.

See also Rollback, Build, CI/CD

The browser’s live model of the page.

The structure the browser builds from your HTML and then keeps in memory. JavaScript changes the page by changing the DOM. What you see in the elements inspector is the DOM, not your original HTML.

See also HTML, Rendering

Configuration supplied from outside your code.

A value handed to your program when it starts, so the same build can point at a test database locally and the real one in production. Where secrets live, because they must never be in code.

See also Secret, Environment

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

A function you call from the client that runs on the server.

Written like a normal function, but the build replaces the body with a network call in the client bundle and the real implementation only ever exists on the server. You get a typed contract for free and the server code never ships to the browser.

See also RPC, Validation, Secret