Dictionary

Dart is the programming language created by Google and used as the sole language for Flutter development. It features a sound type system, null safety, async/await support, and compiles both ahead-of-time (AOT) for production performance and just-in-time (JIT) for fast development cycles with hot reload. Dart's syntax feels familiar to developers coming from JavaScript, TypeScript, Java, or Kotlin, making the transition to Flutter relatively smooth.

Deep linking is the ability to direct users to a specific screen or content within a mobile or web application via a URL, rather than just opening the app's home screen. In React Native and Flutter, this involves configuring URL schemes (e.g., `myapp://profile/123`) or universal/app links that work across platforms. Deep linking is essential for push notification routing, marketing campaigns, sharing content between users, and creating seamless web-to-app transitions.

A design system is a collection of reusable components, guidelines, and standards that ensure visual and functional consistency across a product or suite of products. It typically includes a component library, design tokens, typography rules, color palettes, and documentation. Design systems bridge the gap between designers and developers, enabling teams to build interfaces faster while maintaining a unified look and feel.

Design tokens are the smallest units of a design system — named values representing colors, spacing, typography, border radii, and other visual properties. They act as a single source of truth that can be translated into platform-specific formats (CSS variables, Swift constants, XML resources). By changing token values in one place, you can update the look and feel of an entire application across multiple platforms simultaneously.

A diffusion model is a type of generative AI that creates data by learning to reverse a gradual noise-adding process. During training, the model learns to progressively denoise random noise into coherent outputs like images, audio, or video. Diffusion models power tools like Stable Diffusion, DALL-E, and Midjourney, and have become the dominant architecture for high-quality image generation.

Drag and drop is an interaction pattern that lets users move, reorder, or transfer UI elements by clicking (or touching), holding, and dragging them to a new position. It's used for file uploads, kanban boards, sortable lists, and layout builders. The HTML Drag and Drop API provides native browser support, while libraries like dnd-kit and react-beautiful-dnd offer more polished, accessible, and touch-friendly implementations.

An embedding is a dense numerical vector representation of data — such as text, images, or code — in a high-dimensional space where semantically similar items are positioned closer together. Embeddings are fundamental to semantic search, recommendation systems, and RAG pipelines. They are generated by specialized models and typically stored in vector databases for efficient similarity lookups.

Expo is a platform and set of tools built around React Native that simplifies mobile app development by providing a managed workflow, pre-configured native modules, and over-the-air update capabilities. With Expo, you can start building without installing Xcode or Android Studio, test on physical devices via the Expo Go app, and deploy updates without app store review cycles. Expo's EAS (Expo Application Services) handles cloud builds, submissions, and updates for production apps.

Figma is a browser-based collaborative design tool used for creating UI designs, prototypes, and design systems. Its real-time multiplayer editing, component system, auto layout, and dev mode have made it the industry standard for product design. Developers use Figma to inspect designs, extract CSS values, export assets, and — through plugins and APIs — automate the design-to-code workflow.

Fine-tuning is the process of further training a pre-trained AI model on a smaller, domain-specific dataset to adapt it for a particular task. Instead of training from scratch, fine-tuning adjusts existing model weights, which is significantly cheaper and faster. Common approaches include full fine-tuning, LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation), and instruction tuning for aligning model behavior with specific requirements.

Flexbox (Flexible Box Layout) is a one-dimensional CSS layout model designed for distributing space and aligning items within a container along a single axis — either horizontal or vertical. It excels at handling dynamic content sizes, centering elements, and creating flexible navigation bars, card rows, and form layouts. Properties like `justify-content`, `align-items`, and `flex-grow` give you fine-grained control over how items share available space.

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.