Glossary

Glossary

This page is filled in in your own words. A copy-pasted definition is useless; if you can't write a concept in your own words, you don't know it.

Rule: a concept is checked off only when you can explain it in 5 minutes without notes.

Month 1

✅	Concept	Your definition	Who
☐	B-tree index
☐	EXPLAIN ANALYZE output
☐	Sequential scan vs index scan
☐	N+1 query problem
☐	Transactions and ACID
☐	Isolation levels
☐	Dirty / non-repeatable / phantom read
☐	Connection pool
☐	REST resource design
☐	Idempotency
☐	API contract and breaking changes
☐	Docker image vs container

Month 2

✅	Concept	Your definition	Who
☐	Token and context window
☐	Embedding vector
☐	Transformer and attention (conceptual)
☐	Tool calling contract
☐	Agent loop
☐	System prompt
☐	State management
☐	Infinite loop risk / max steps

Month 3

✅	Concept	Your definition	Who
☐	Eval set
☐	Task success rate
☐	Tool selection accuracy
☐	Step efficiency
☐	Ground truth
☐	LLM-as-a-judge
☐	Regression
☐	Non-determinism
☐	Eval pipeline
☐	Baseline

Month 4

✅	Concept	Your definition	Who
☐	Thread pool
☐	Blocking / non-blocking operation
☐	Race condition
☐	Deadlock
☐	Task queue
☐	Cache hit ratio
☐	Latency vs throughput
☐	p95 / p99
☐	Token cost

Month 5

✅	Concept	Your definition	Who
☐	Authentication vs authorization
☐	Signed access token (JWT)
☐	Rate limiting (token bucket)
☐	Prompt injection
☐	Tool permission
☐	Structured log
☐	Counter / gauge / histogram
☐	Trace and span
☐	Correlation ID
☐	CI/CD pipeline