Infrastructure as Code

Hydration is the process where a client-side JavaScript framework attaches event listeners and interactivity to server-rendered HTML markup. After the server sends pre-rendered HTML for fast initial display, the framework "hydrates" it by reconciling its virtual representation with the existing DOM and making it interactive. Hydration can be expensive on complex pages, which has led to innovations like partial hydration, progressive hydration, and React's selective hydration with Suspense.

Semantic HTML means using HTML elements that clearly describe their meaning and purpose, such as `<article>`, `<nav>`, `<header>`, and `<section>`, instead of generic `<div>` tags. This practice improves accessibility for screen readers, boosts SEO by helping search engines understand page structure, and makes code far more readable for other developers. It's considered a foundational best practice in modern web development.

A webhook is a mechanism where one system sends an automated HTTP request to another system when a specific event occurs. Unlike polling, where the client repeatedly checks for updates, webhooks push data in real time, making them far more efficient. They are widely used to connect services — for example, triggering a deployment when code is merged or sending a Slack notification when a payment is processed.

Flutter is Google's open-source UI toolkit for building natively compiled applications for mobile, web, and desktop from a single Dart codebase. Unlike React Native which maps to platform-native UI components, Flutter renders everything with its own high-performance Skia/Impeller rendering engine, giving developers pixel-perfect control over every element on screen. This approach ensures identical visual output across platforms but means Flutter widgets don't automatically adopt platform-specific design conventions.

React's Context API provides a way to pass data through the component tree without manually threading props through every intermediate level. You create a context with `createContext`, wrap a subtree with a `Provider`, and consume the value anywhere below with `useContext`. It's ideal for global concerns like themes, authentication state, or locale, but should be used judiciously since any change to context value re-renders all consuming components.

Orchestration is the automated coordination of multiple services, tasks, or systems to execute a complex workflow. An orchestrator acts as a central controller that manages the sequence, parallelism, error handling, and retries of individual steps. In the context of AI agents, orchestration involves chaining LLM calls, tool use, and decision-making steps; in DevOps, it coordinates container deployment, scaling, and service discovery.