Research & reasoning
Abductive reasoning
Reasoning from observations to a plausible explanation, while recognizing that another explanation may fit better.
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A growing collection of useful ideas, named.
A little knowledge goes a long way.30 concepts
Writing & communication
Active voice
A sentence construction in which the subject performs the action expressed by the verb.
Writing & communication
Ambiguity
A situation in which wording or evidence supports more than one plausible interpretation.
Software engineering
Atomic
An operation completes as a whole or leaves none of its partial changes behind.
Software engineering
Bounded context
A defined boundary within which a particular model and its terms have a consistent meaning.
Software engineering
Canary release
Introducing a change to a small portion of real traffic first, then expanding if the results are acceptable.
Software engineering
Circuit breaker
A mechanism that temporarily stops calls to a failing dependency and later probes for recovery.
Product & design
Cognitive load
The mental effort required to understand information or carry out a task.
Research & reasoning
Confirmation bias
A tendency to favor evidence that supports an existing belief and discount evidence that challenges it.
Research & reasoning
Counterfactual
An alternative to what actually happened, used to reason about what might have happened under different conditions.
Research & reasoning
Defeasible
Reasonable to accept on current evidence, but open to revision when relevant new information appears.
Operations & workflows
Error budget
The amount of unreliability permitted by a service’s reliability objective over a defined period.
Product & design
Error prevention
Designing a process to reduce the chance of a mistake before it happens.
Software engineering
Exponential backoff
A retry strategy that multiplies the waiting time after successive failures, usually up to a limit.
Research & reasoning
Falsifiability
The possibility that an observable result could show a claim to be false.
Research & reasoning
Hypothesis
A proposed explanation or claim that can be investigated against evidence.
Software engineering
Idempotent
Repeating an operation has the same intended effect as performing it once.
Product & design
Information scent
The clues that help someone estimate whether a link or information source will lead to what they need.
Software engineering
Latency
The time taken for an operation or request to produce its response.
Product & design
Mental model
A person’s working understanding of how something behaves, used to explain it and predict what happens next.
Writing & communication
Parallel structure
Using matching grammatical forms for ideas that play the same role in a sentence or list.
Writing & communication
Plain language
Writing organized and expressed so its intended readers can find, understand, and use what they need.
Product & design
Progressive disclosure
Showing essential information first and revealing additional complexity when someone asks for it.
Product & design
Recognition over recall
Making options or information visible so people can identify what they need instead of retrieving it from memory.