Change amplification

Change amplification is when a local change requires many changes elsewhere.

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Immutable infrastructure

Servers (or VMs) are never modified after deployment. If a modification is required, a new server is provisioned.

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Entropy

Entropy is a measure of disorder. Software usually becomes more difficult and costly to maintain over time. Its entropy tends to increase as a result. Note to myself: The Boy Scout Rule, code refactoring and paying technical debt help reducing software entropy.

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Declarative vs imperative

Declarative programming is when you tell what you want. Imperative is when you say how to get what you want.

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Closure

Closure is when a function is able to remember and access its lexical scope even when that function is executing outside its lexical scope. Source: https://astronautweb.co/javascript-lexical-scope/

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Lexical scope

In a nested group of functions, the inner functions have access to the variables and other resources of their parent scope. This means that the child functions are lexically bound to the execution context of their parents. Lexical scope is sometimes also referred to as static scope. Source: https://stackoverflow.com/a/53062093

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Sanity tests

They verify if a proposed functionality or a bug fix works as expected. There is a difference between sanity and smoke tests.

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Smoke tests

Smoke tests verify if the most important features works as usual to prevent wasting QA team time. There is a difference between smoke and sanity tests.

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Law of Leaky Abstractions

All non-trivial abstractions, to some degree, are leaky. Joel Spolsky To be able to use reliable software, we need to learn abstraction’s underlying details anyway. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaky_abstraction

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Selectivity

Selectivity is the number of unique values produced by an operation (e.g. an index scan or filter), relative to the total number of rows. The higher the selectivity, the more likely PostgreSQL is able to use an index. Source: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/development/understanding_explain_plans.html#cardinality-and-selectivity

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