The stack, without the jargon

.NET is Microsoft's open-source, cross-platform development framework, used with C# to build web APIs, enterprise applications, desktop software, and cloud services.

An AI agent is a software system that uses a large language model to reason about a goal, then autonomously takes multi-step actions such as calling tools, querying data, and updating systems to accomplish it.

Android is Google's open source mobile operating system, the most widely used smartphone platform in the world, with native apps typically built in Kotlin using Jetpack Compose.

Angular is an open source TypeScript-based web framework, maintained by Google, that provides a complete, opinionated platform for building large single-page applications.

Anthropic is an AI safety and research company, founded in 2021, that builds the Claude family of large language models and offers them to developers through an API.

Apache Cassandra is an open-source, distributed wide-column NoSQL database designed for massive write throughput and continuous availability across many servers and data centers.

Apache Cordova is an open source framework that wraps a web application in a native container, exposing device features to HTML, CSS, and JavaScript through a plugin system.

Apache JMeter is an open-source Java application for load and performance testing, used to simulate heavy concurrent traffic against web applications, APIs, and other services.

Apache Kafka is an open source distributed event streaming platform that lets systems publish, store, and consume streams of records in real time, acting as a durable, high-throughput backbone for data pipelines.

Appium is an open-source automation framework for testing native, hybrid, and mobile web applications on iOS and Android using the WebDriver protocol.

AWS (Amazon Web Services) is Amazon's cloud computing platform and the largest in the market, offering hundreds of services for compute, storage, databases, networking, AI, and more.

Bootstrap is a long-established open source CSS and JavaScript framework, originally created at Twitter, that provides a responsive grid system and a library of pre-styled UI components.

Chai is a JavaScript assertion library that provides readable, chainable syntax for expressing what code is expected to do, most often used together with the Mocha test framework.

CI/CD (continuous integration and continuous delivery or deployment) is the practice of automatically building, testing, and releasing software every time code changes, using automated pipelines.

Claude is a family of large language models built by Anthropic, used for reasoning, writing, coding, and powering AI agents through an API.

Cloudflare is a global network platform providing CDN, DNS, DDoS protection, and security services, along with an edge computing platform for running code close to users worldwide.

Couchbase is a distributed NoSQL document database that combines a memory-first architecture with SQL-like querying, full-text search, and built-in mobile sync.

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is the language that controls the visual presentation of web pages, defining layout, color, typography, spacing, and animation.

Cypress is an open-source, JavaScript-based testing framework for writing end-to-end and component tests that run directly in the browser.

DigitalOcean is a cloud provider focused on simplicity and predictable pricing, offering virtual machines (Droplets), managed Kubernetes, managed databases, and an app hosting platform.

Django is a high-level Python web framework that follows a batteries-included philosophy, providing an ORM, admin interface, authentication, and security features out of the box.

Docker is a platform for packaging applications and their dependencies into containers: lightweight, portable units that run the same way on a developer laptop, a server, or any cloud.

DynamoDB is Amazon Web Services' fully managed NoSQL key-value and document database, built for consistent single-digit-millisecond performance at virtually any scale.

Elasticsearch is a distributed search and analytics engine built on Apache Lucene, used for full-text search, log analytics, and fast queries over large volumes of semi-structured data.

Electron is an open source framework for building cross-platform desktop applications for Windows, macOS, and Linux using web technologies, bundling Chromium and Node.js into one runtime.

Embeddings are numerical vector representations of text, images, or other data produced by machine learning models, positioned so that items with similar meaning end up close together in vector space.

Express.js is a minimal, unopinionated web framework for Node.js used to build APIs and web servers through a simple system of routes and middleware.

Fine-tuning is the process of further training a pre-trained machine learning model on a smaller, task-specific dataset so it performs better on a particular domain, style, or task.

Firebase is Google's app development platform providing managed backend services, including the Firestore and Realtime Database NoSQL databases, authentication, hosting, and cloud functions.

Flask is a lightweight Python web framework that provides routing and request handling with minimal structure, letting developers add only the components they need.

Flutter is an open source UI toolkit from Google for building natively compiled applications for mobile, web, and desktop from a single Dart codebase.

Gatsby is an open source React-based static site generator that builds pages ahead of time from content sources like CMSs and Markdown, producing fast, pre-rendered websites.

Gemini is Google's family of multimodal large language models, capable of processing text, images, audio, and video, and available to developers through the Gemini API and Google Cloud Vertex AI.

GitLab CI/CD is the continuous integration and delivery system built into the GitLab platform, running automated pipelines defined in a .gitlab-ci.yml file alongside the code they build.

Go, also known as Golang, is a statically typed, compiled programming language from Google designed for simplicity, fast compilation, and built-in concurrency.

Google Cloud (Google Cloud Platform, or GCP) is Google's suite of cloud computing services, covering compute, storage, networking, databases, data analytics, and machine learning infrastructure.

GraphQL is a query language and runtime for APIs that lets clients request exactly the data they need from a single endpoint, defined by a strongly typed schema.

HTML5 is the modern standard of HTML, the markup language that defines the structure and content of every web page, adding semantic elements, multimedia, and rich browser APIs.

Hugging Face is a platform and open source ecosystem for machine learning that hosts hundreds of thousands of models, datasets, and demos, and maintains widely used libraries such as Transformers.

Ionic is an open source framework for building mobile and desktop apps with web technologies, wrapping HTML, CSS, and JavaScript interfaces in a native shell via Capacitor.

iOS is Apple's mobile operating system for iPhone, with native apps built in Swift using SwiftUI or UIKit and distributed through the App Store.

Java is a statically typed, object-oriented programming language that runs on the Java Virtual Machine, long established as a standard for large-scale enterprise backends.

JavaScript is the programming language of the web, running natively in every browser and, through runtimes like Node.js, on servers and devices as well.

Jenkins is a long-running open-source automation server used to build, test, and deploy software, best known as one of the original and most widely deployed CI/CD tools.

Jest is a JavaScript testing framework, originally created at Facebook, used for unit and integration testing of JavaScript and TypeScript code with built-in assertions, mocking, and coverage reporting.

Jira is Atlassian's project tracking platform, widely used by software teams to manage work items, sprints, releases, and bug tracking across the development lifecycle.

JUnit is the standard unit testing framework for Java, providing annotations, assertions, and a test runner used to verify Java code in everything from small libraries to large enterprise systems.

Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration system that automates the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications across clusters of machines.

LangChain is an open source framework for building applications powered by large language models, providing abstractions for prompts, model calls, retrieval, tools, and memory in Python and JavaScript.

LangGraph is an open source orchestration framework from the LangChain team for building stateful, multi-step AI agents as graphs, where nodes represent actions and edges control the flow between them.

A large language model (LLM) is a neural network trained on vast amounts of text that can understand and generate language, enabling tasks such as answering questions, summarizing, translating, and writing code.

Material UI (MUI) is an open source React component library implementing Google's Material Design, providing ready-made, accessible UI components for building applications quickly.

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard, introduced by Anthropic in 2024, that defines how AI applications connect to external tools, data sources, and services through a common client-server interface.

Microsoft Azure is Microsoft's cloud computing platform, providing compute, storage, databases, networking, AI, and enterprise services with deep integration into the Microsoft ecosystem.

Mocha is a flexible JavaScript test framework that runs on Node.js and in the browser, providing the structure for tests while letting teams choose their own assertion and mocking libraries.

MongoDB is a document-oriented NoSQL database that stores data as flexible JSON-like documents, designed for evolving schemas and horizontal scaling.

MySQL is a widely used open-source relational database management system, valued for speed, ease of operation, and its long history powering web applications.

NestJS is a TypeScript-first Node.js framework that brings structured architecture, dependency injection, and modules to server-side applications.

Next.js is an open source React framework, maintained by Vercel, that adds server-side rendering, static generation, routing, and API endpoints on top of React.

Node.js is an open-source JavaScript runtime built on the V8 engine that lets developers run JavaScript on servers, powering APIs, real-time services, and backend tooling.

Ollama is an open source tool for running large language models locally on your own hardware, packaging model weights and configuration so models can be downloaded and served with a single command.

OpenAI is an AI research and product company best known for ChatGPT and the GPT family of large language models, which developers access through the OpenAI API to build language, vision, and audio features.

PostgreSQL is an open-source relational database known for standards compliance, reliability, and extensibility, supporting advanced data types, full-text search, and JSON alongside traditional SQL.

Postman is a platform for building, testing, and documenting APIs, letting developers send requests, write automated test scripts, and share API collections across teams.

Prompt engineering is the practice of designing and refining the instructions given to a large language model to make its outputs more accurate, consistent, and useful for a specific task.

A Progressive Web App (PWA) is a website enhanced with modern browser capabilities so it can be installed on a device, work offline, and behave like a native application.

Python is a high-level, general-purpose programming language known for readable syntax and a vast ecosystem, widely used for web backends, data work, automation, and AI.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is a technique that improves large language model answers by first retrieving relevant documents from a knowledge source and supplying them to the model as context before it responds.

React is an open source JavaScript library, originally created at Meta, for building user interfaces out of reusable components that update efficiently when data changes.

React Native is an open source framework, created at Meta, for building native iOS and Android applications using React and JavaScript or TypeScript.

Redis is an in-memory data store used as a cache, message broker, and fast database, holding data structures like strings, hashes, lists, and sorted sets with sub-millisecond access.

Remix is an open source full-stack React framework focused on web standards, server rendering, and fast data loading, whose core ideas have been merged into React Router.

Selenium is a long-established open-source framework for automating web browsers, most commonly used to run cross-browser end-to-end tests through the WebDriver protocol.

Solid.js is an open source JavaScript framework that combines a React-like component syntax with fine-grained reactivity, updating the DOM directly without a virtual DOM.

Spring Boot is a Java framework that builds on the Spring ecosystem with auto-configuration and embedded servers, making it the standard way to create production-ready Java services.

SQLite is a self-contained, serverless SQL database engine that stores an entire database in a single file, embedded directly inside the application that uses it.

Storybook is an open-source workshop for building, documenting, and testing UI components in isolation, outside the full application, across frameworks like React, Vue, and Angular.

Svelte is an open source frontend framework that compiles components into efficient vanilla JavaScript at build time, rather than shipping a runtime framework to the browser.

SwiftUI is Apple's declarative UI framework for building native applications across iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and Apple TV using the Swift language.

Tailwind CSS is a utility-first CSS framework that styles interfaces through small, single-purpose classes applied directly in markup instead of hand-written stylesheets.

Terraform is an infrastructure-as-code tool from HashiCorp that lets teams define cloud infrastructure in declarative configuration files and create, change, and version it safely and repeatably.

TypeScript is an open source superset of JavaScript, developed by Microsoft, that adds static typing so errors can be caught at compile time instead of at runtime.

A vector database is a database designed to store and search embeddings, which are numerical representations of text, images, or other data, enabling fast similarity search across millions of items.

Vue.js is an open source, progressive JavaScript framework for building user interfaces, known for its gentle learning curve and single-file component format.