Glossary
This glossary defines key concepts used throughout the Think Before Coding framework. These terms provide a shared vocabulary for understanding system design, architecture thinking, and AI-native software development.
Architecture
The structural design of a software system, defining components, their responsibilities, and the interactions between them. Architecture determines how a system scales, evolves, and maintains reliability over time.
Asynchronous Processing
A system design pattern where tasks are executed outside the immediate request-response cycle. This allows computationally intensive operations, such as AI inference or data processing, to run in the background without blocking user interactions.
Attack Surface
The collection of all possible points where an attacker could attempt to compromise a system. Reducing the attack surface is a core goal of secure system design.
Boundary
A logical separation between components or services within a system. Clear boundaries improve maintainability, scalability, and security by limiting how different parts of the system interact.
Distributed System
A system composed of multiple independent components or services that communicate over a network to achieve a common goal. Distributed systems must address challenges such as consistency, latency, and fault tolerance.
Event-Driven Architecture
An architectural pattern in which system components communicate by producing and consuming events. This design improves scalability and decouples services.
Failure Modeling
The process of identifying potential system failures and designing mechanisms to detect, mitigate, and recover from them.
Observability
The ability to understand a system’s internal state by analyzing external outputs such as logs, metrics, and traces.
Orchestration
The coordination and management of multiple services, tasks, or AI models to achieve a specific workflow within a system.
Resilience
The ability of a system to continue operating under failure conditions and recover gracefully from disruptions.
Scalability
The capacity of a system to handle increasing workloads without significant degradation in performance.
System Thinking
An approach to problem-solving that views software not as isolated features but as interconnected systems with dependencies, constraints, and interactions.
Technical Debt
The long-term cost of shortcuts or suboptimal design decisions that make systems harder to maintain, extend, or scale.
Threat Modeling
A structured process used to identify potential security threats, vulnerabilities, and attack vectors within a system.
AI-Native System
A software system designed from the ground up to integrate artificial intelligence capabilities, including model inference, orchestration, monitoring, and lifecycle management.
Zero-Trust Architecture
A security model based on the principle that no user, device, or system should be automatically trusted. Every interaction must be continuously verified.
Summary
The concepts in this glossary provide the foundational vocabulary needed to understand the principles and practices described in the Think Before Coding framework.
Shared terminology helps engineers communicate more clearly when designing complex systems.
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