Technical Cheat Sheet

Core Terms

Front-end: The user-facing part of the application (what they can 'see').
Back-end: The part of the application that the user does not 'see'—it supports the front-end.
Database: Where application data is stored.
Testing: There's manual testing that a person does, and there's also the automated tests that are written in code to verify other code works.
Regression Testing: Making sure a change did not change/break something else.
Major/Minor/Patch Version: This is referring to Semantic Versioning, a way to describe software versions.

AWS: Amazon Web Services
JSON: JavaScript Object Notation. A popular data format that is used when applications talk with each other. You could send requests in JSON and the other side could respond in JSON.
API: Application Programming Interface. It is a way for an application to be programmatically communicated with (for ex., Twitter has an API so other applications can access Twitter data).

RDS: Relational Database Service on AWS. Where application data can be hosted on AWS.
S3: Cloud file storage. For example, if the application needs to store user uploaded documents or files, you would use S3.
EC2: Cloud servers.
Elastic Beanstalk: A managed way to deploy to AWS. Out of the box autoscaling and other infrastructure settings. An alternative to Heroku.

Github: A website where code and its history can be stored and where teams can collaborate on to make code changes.
CircleCI: A service for Continuous Integration. It can automatically run code tests when changes are pushed up to Github (for ex.) or other automated checks.