The Backend Engineering Show with Hussein Nasser
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The Backend Engineering Show with Hussein Nasser
Welcome to the Backend Engineering Show podcast with your host Hussein Nasser. If you like software engineering you’ve come to the right place. I discuss all sorts of software engineering technologies and news with specific focus on the backend. All opinions are my own. Most of my content in the p...
Nedavne epizode
534 epizoda
Amazon US-EAST-1 Outage in Details
On October 19 2025 AWS experienced an outage that lasted over a day, 10 days later we finally got the root cause analysis and we know exactly what cau...
Graceful shutdown in HTTP
There are cases where the backend may need to close the connection to prevent unexpected situations, prevent bad actors or simply just free up resourc...
Asynchronous IO in Postgres 18
Postgres 18 has been released with many exciting features such as UUIDv7, Over explain module, composite index skip scans, and the most anticipated as...
kTLS - Kernel level TLS
Fundamentals of Operating Systems Course https://oscourse.winktls is brilliant.TLS encryption/decryption often happens in userland. While TCP lives in...
The beauty of the CPU
If you are bored of contemporary topics of AI and need a breather, I invite you to join me to explore a mundane, fundamental and earthy topic.
<...
Sequential Scans in Postgres just got faster
This new PostgreSQL 17 feature is game changer. They know can combine IOs when performing sequential scan.
Grab my database course
https:...
Does discipline work?
No technical video today, just talking about the idea of discipline and consistency.
Socket management and Kernel Data structures
Fundamentals of Operating Systems Course
This video is an overview of how the operating system kernel does socket management and the different...
The genius of long polling
Polling is the ability to interrogate a backend to see if a piece of information is ready. It can introduce a chatty system and as a result long polli...
Six stages of a good software engineer
You get better as a software engineer when you go through these stages.
0:00 Intro
1:15 Understand a technology
7:07...
This new Linux patch can speed up Reading Requests
Fundamentals of Operating Systems Course
https://oscourse.win
Very clever! We often call read/rcv system call to read requests fro...
Cloudflare's 150ms global cache purge | Deep Dive
Cloudflare built a global cache purge system that runs under 150 ms.
This is how they did it.
Using RockDB to...
MySQL is having a bumpy journey
Fundamentals of Database Engineering udemy course https://databases.win
MySQL has been having bumpy journey since 2018 with the re...
How many kernel calls in NodeJS vs Bun vs Python vs native C
Fundamentals of Operating Systems Course
https://oscourse.win
In this video I use strace a performance tool that measures how many...
When do you use threads?
Fundamentals of Operating Systems Course
https://os.husseinnasser.com
When do you use threads?
I would...
Frontend and Backends Timeouts
I am fascinated by how timeouts affect backend and frontend programming.
When a party is waiting on something you can place a timeout to break t...
Postgres is combining IO in version 17
Learn more about database and OS internals, check out my courses
Fundamentals of database engineering https://databases.win
Fundamentals...
Windows vs Linux Kernel
Fundamentals of Operating Systems Course
https://os.husseinnasser.com
Why Windows Kernel connects slower than Linux
...
Running out of TCP ephemeral source ports
In this episode of the backend engineering show I describe an interesting bug I ran into where the web server ran out of ephemeral ports causing the s...
io uring gets even faster
Fundamentals of Operating Systems Course
https://os.husseinnasser.com
Linux I/O expert and subsystem maintainer Jens Axboe has sub...
They made Python faster with this compiler option
Fundamentals of Operating Systems Course
https://oscourse.win
Looks like fedora is compiling cpython with the -o3 flag, which does...
How Apache Kafka got faster by switching ext4 to XFS
https://oscourse.win
Allegro improved their Kafka produce tail latency by over 80% when they switched from ext4 to xfs. What I enj...
Google Patches Linux kernel with 40% TCP performance
Get my backend course https://backend.win
Google submitted a patch to Linux Kernel 6.8 to improve TCP performance by 40%, this is...
Database Torn pages
0:00 Intro
2:00 File System Block vs Database Pages
4:00 Torn pages or partial page
7:40 How Oracle Solves torn pages
8:40 MyS...
Cloudflare Open sources Pingora (NGINX replacement)
Get my backend course https://backend.win
Cloudflare has announced they are opening sources Pingora as a networking framework! Big...
The Internals of MongoDB
https://backend.win
https://databases.win
I’m a big believer that database systems share similar core fundamentals at their...
The Beauty of Programming Languages
In this video I explore the type of languages, compiled, garbage collected, interpreted, JIT and more.
The Danger of Defaults - A PostgreSQL Story
I talk about default values and how PostgreSQL 14 got slower when a default parameter has changed.
Mike's blog
https://smalldatum....
Database Background writing
Background writing is a process that writes dirty pages in shared buffer to the disk (well goes to the OS file cache then get flushed to disk by the O...
The Cost of Memory Fragmentation
Fragmentation is a very interesting topic to me, especially when it comes to memory.
While virtually memory does solve external fragment...
The Real Hidden Cost of a Request
In this video I explore the hidden costs of sending a request from the frontend to the backend
Heard
Why create Index blocks writes
Fundamentals of Database Engineering udemy course (link redirects to udemy with coupon)
https://database.husseinnasser.com
...
The Problems of an HTTP/3 Backend
HTTP/3 is getting popular in the cloud scene but before you migrate to HTTP/3 consider its cost. I explore it here.
0:00 Intro HTTP/3 is...
Encrypted Client Hello - The Pros & Cons
The Encrypted Client Hello or ECH is a new RFC that encrypts the TLS client hello to hide sensitive information like the SNI. In this video I go throu...
The Journey of a Request to the Backend
From the frontend through the kernel to the backend process
When we send a request to a backend most of us focus on the processing aspect of the...
They Enabled Postgres Partitioning and their Backend fell apart
In a wonderful blog, Kyle explores the pains he faced managing a Postgres instance for a startup he works for and how enabling partitioning sigintfica...
WebTransport - A Backend Game Changer
WebTransport is a cutting-edge protocol framework designed to support multiplexed and secure transport over HTTP/2 and HTTP/3. It brings together the...
Your SSD lies but that's ok | Postgres fsync
fsync is a linux system call that flushes all pages and metadata for a given file to the disk. It is indeed an expensive operation but required for du...
The problem with software engineering
ego is the main problem to a defective software product. the ego of the engineer or the tech lead seeps into the quality of the product.
...
2x Faster Reads and Writes with this MongoDB feature | Clustered Collections
Fundamentals of Database Engineering udemy course (link redirects to udemy with coupon)
https://database.husseinnasser.com
I...