Glossary

The words, without the shrug

Every term the courses use, defined in one line and then in a paragraph. Written to be read out of order.

Showing 4 of 4 matching “Round trip”

GraphQL

Backend

An API style where the client states what it wants.

One endpoint that accepts a description of the desired data. Fills a rich screen in one round trip with no unused fields, at the cost of much harder caching and rate limiting.

Latency

Infrastructure

Time spent waiting rather than working.

The delay before a response begins. Largely set by physical distance and the number of round trips, not by processing speed. London to Virginia is about 80ms round trip no matter how good your code is.

N+1

Data & Databases

One query for the list, then one per item.

Fetching 50 posts and then fetching each post’s author separately: 51 round trips. Invisible with test data, ruinous with real data. A database call inside a loop is the tell.

Round trip

Frontend

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.