Founder technical glossary
Use the Term. Understand the Consequence.
Concise definitions for technical language used in proposals, product reviews, testing plans, infrastructure decisions, and AI-assisted workflows.
- API
- An application programming interface that lets parts of a system exchange defined requests and responses.
- Endpoint
- A specific API address used for a particular operation.
- Payload
- The data sent with a request or returned in a response.
- Schema
- The agreed structure used to organise product data.
- Migration
- A controlled change to a database structure.
- SQL
- A language used to define, query, and change relational data.
- NoSQL
- A broad category of database models that do not use a traditional relational table model as their primary structure.
- Authentication
- The process of checking who a user is.
- Authorisation
- The process of checking what an identified user is allowed to do.
- Validation
- Checking whether data meets the product’s required rules.
- Data integrity
- The condition in which stored data remains accurate, valid, and internally consistent.
- Reverse proxy
- A server that receives incoming web requests and forwards them to the correct application process.
- Process manager
- A tool that keeps an application process running and can restart it after a crash or reboot.
- Queue
- A waiting line for work that can be processed separately from the immediate user request.
- Rate limiting
- A control that restricts how frequently an action or request can occur.
- Observability
- The evidence used to understand how a running system is behaving.
- Rollback
- A controlled way to return to a known working version after a failed change.
- Staging environment
- A non-live environment used to rehearse changes in conditions resembling production.
- CI/CD
- A set of automated practices for integrating, checking, and delivering software changes.
- Tenant isolation
- Controls that prevent one customer or organisation from accessing another’s data and actions.
- Idempotency
- The property that repeating the same request does not repeat its effect.