All Articles

Terminology from Interviews

I have been doing a lot of interviews these past couple weeks—maybe 10—as I have been searching for a job. I have been told that terminology—knowing exact words to use in different situations—is important at WeCode, but didn’t fully understand it until I went through interviews. Below are some examples written in no speicic order, just based off what I recall.

  1. populate
  • to add record to a database. It can be data for testing an application’s functionality or the actual data during implementation.
  1. sanitize
  • to remove malicious data from user input, such as form submissions
  • to clean user input to avoid code-conflicts (duplicate ids for instance), security issues (xss codes etc), or other issues that might arise from non-standardized input & human error/deviance.
  1. stale
  • old data that is no longer fresh. something that has not been updated to represent current information
  1. pure
  • of which return value is only determined by its input values, without observable side effects.
  1. side effect
  • the modification of some kind of state outside its local environment something like a mutable data structure or variable, using IO, throwing an exception or halts an erro
  • does not have to be hidden or unexpected, and I was told that sometime side effects are used on purpose in order to implement certain things of which examples that I do not recall
  1. declarative
  • a programming paradigm in which the programmer defines what needs to be accomplished by the program without defining how it needs to be implemented.
  1. imperative
  • opposite of declarative. you have to define how it needs to be implemented.
  1. memoize
  • caching information to return the output when a program receives an input that it has experienced
  1. stateless
  • no record of previous interactions and each interaction request has to be handled based entirely on information that comes with it.
  • opposite of stateful, which keeps the records of previous interactions
  1. RESTful: Definition from RESTFULAPI.net
  • Representational State Transfer
  • Characteristics
    • stateless: as described above, each request from client to server must contain all the necessary information to understand the request as no information from previous requests is stored
    • cacheable: data within a response to a request must be labeled as cacheable or non-cacheable. If cacheable, a client cache is given the right to reuse that response data for later
    • Uniform interface: four interface constraints:
      • identification of resources
      • manipulation of resources through representations
      • self-descriptive messages
      • hypermedia as the engine of application state
    • to be honest, I have no idea what the fourth constraint means
  1. compile
  • the process of creating an executable program from code written in a compiled programming language
  • allows a computer to run and understand a program without the need of the programming software used to create the program

Aug 10, 2019

AI Enthusiast and a Software Engineer