The Backend Engineering Show with Hussein Nasser
by Hussein Nasser
Latest episode
Developers will be prompters (and that is bad)
Developers will be prompters (and that is bad)
About this podcast
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 podcast is an audio version of videos I post on my youtube channel here http://www.youtube.com/c/HusseinNasser-software-engineering
Buy me a coffee
https://www.buymeacoffee.com/hnasr
🧑🏫 Courses I Teach
https://husseinnasser.com/courses
Episodes
The newest 50 of 547 episodes
- Developers will be prompters (and that is bad) · 9 minI discuss the state of what will be happening in the coming few years and why I encourage the 3 of you who want to be elite engineers to keep their critical thinking sharp. To…
- AI will not replace elite engineers · 56 minThis is a conversation with Rashed Hasan, a PhD Candidate from the University of Nebraska. We chatted about databases, ORMs and how to use AI without losing yourself. Rashed…
- Engineers will be out of the 'Loops' · 13 minI discuss loops engineering and how it will numb creative thinking and critical system design for engineers.
- SQL was a mistake · 12 minI like SQL but the standard should have included ways to hint instead of the abstraction of "let me do it for you"
- Caching is a cop-out · 16 minIn this episode I explore why you should take some time to examine the operation you are caching before doing so. And why caching is a cop-out
- How a query optimization gave birth to infinite scroll · 21 minThe infinite scroll in social media as we know it today is despised by all. But it always start as a bad idea. It originated as a result of UI change to relief the backend…
- Postgres is half as fast in Linux 7.0 · 34 minAn aws engineer discovered a 50% regression in postgres throughput while testing the new Linux 7.0 kernel. The cause turns out to be massive TLB and page faults exacerbated by…
- Don't let AI rob you · 32 minA discussion about why many engineers still love the struggle, the mistakes, and the process of figuring things out themselves. This is how we grow and get better and stronger…
- New Book: Root cause · 10 minI wrote a new book that has been in the works for years. It is called Root Cause, and it is for those who enjoy the art of backend engineering. Early in my career, 20 years ago…
- 5 Backend Design Patterns for Managing Threads and Sockets · 46 minIn this video I introduce 5 different design patterns for building backend applications. Each mode explains how a socket listener is established, a connections are established…
- Page Tables · 47 minPage tables provide the mapping between virtual memory and physical memory for each process. This means it needs to be as efficient and as fast as possible. I explore the inner…
- CPU and Kernel Page Faults · 49 minPage faults occurs when the process tries to access a memory that isn’t backed by a physical page kernel raises a fault which loads a page. It happens on first access, stack…
- Amazon US-EAST-1 Outage in Details · 24 minOn 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 caused the DNS to fail0:00…
- Graceful shutdown in HTTP · 26 minThere are cases where the backend may need to close the connection to prevent unexpected situations, prevent bad actors or simply just free up resources. Closing a connection…
- Postgres 18 gets Async IO · 41 minPostgres 18 has been released with many exciting features such as UUIDv7, Over explain module, composite index skip scans, and the most anticipated asynchronous IO with worker…
- Kernel level TLS · 23 minFundamentals of Operating Systems Course https://oscourse.winktls is brilliant.TLS encryption/decryption often happens in userland. While TCP lives in the kernel. With ktls…
- The beauty of the CPU · 10 minIf 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. The CPU. A reading of my substack…
- Sequential Scans in Postgres just got faster · 28 minThis new PostgreSQL 17 feature is game changer. They know can combine IOs when performing sequential scan. Grab my database course https://courses.husseinnasser.com
- Does discipline work? · 10 minNo technical video today, just talking about the idea of discipline and consistency.
- Socket management and Kernel Data structures · 31 minFundamentals of Operating Systems Course This video is an overview of how the operating system kernel does socket management and the different data structures it utilizes to…
- The genius of long polling · 29 minPolling 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 polling was born. In this video I…
- Six stages of a good software engineer · 39 minYou get better as a software engineer when you go through these stages. 0:00 Intro 1:15 Understand a technology 7:07 Articulate how it works 15:30 Understand its’ limitations…
- This new Linux patch can speed up Reading Requests · 18 minFundamentals of Operating Systems Course https://oscourse.win Very clever! We often call read/rcv system call to read requests from a connection, this copies data from kernel…
- Cloudflare's 150ms global cache purge | Deep Dive · 1 h 2 minCloudflare built a global cache purge system that runs under 150 ms. This is how they did it. Using RockDB to maintain local CDN cache, and a peer-to-peer data center…
- MySQL is having a bumpy journey · 29 minFundamentals of Database Engineering udemy course https://databases.win MySQL has been having bumpy journey since 2018 with the release of the version 8.0. Critical crashes that…
- How many kernel calls in NodeJS vs Bun vs Python vs native C · 21 minFundamentals of Operating Systems Course https://oscourse.win In this video I use strace a performance tool that measures how many system calls does a process makes. We compare…
- When do you use threads? · 31 minFundamentals of Operating Systems Course https://os.husseinnasser.com When do you use threads? I would say in scenarios where the task is either 1) IO blocking task 2) CPU…
- Frontend and Backends Timeouts · 25 minI am fascinated by how timeouts affect backend and frontend programming. When a party is waiting on something you can place a timeout to break the wait. This is useful for…
- Postgres is combining IO in version 17 · 28 minLearn more about database and OS internals, check out my courses Fundamentals of database engineering https://databases.win Fundamentals of operating systems…
- Windows vs Linux Kernel · 37 minFundamentals of Operating Systems Course https://os.husseinnasser.com Why Windows Kernel connects slower than Linux I explore the behavior of TCP/IP stack in Windows kernel…
- Running out of TCP ephemeral source ports · 20 minIn 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 system to halt. 0:00 Intro…
- io uring gets even faster · 17 minFundamentals of Operating Systems Course https://os.husseinnasser.com Linux I/O expert and subsystem maintainer Jens Axboe has submitted all of the IO_uring feature updates…
- They made Python faster with this compiler option · 29 minFundamentals of Operating Systems Course https://oscourse.win Looks like fedora is compiling cpython with the -o3 flag, which does aggressive function inlining among other…
- How Apache Kafka got faster by switching ext4 to XFS · 34 minhttps://oscourse.win Allegro improved their Kafka produce tail latency by over 80% when they switched from ext4 to xfs. What I enjoyed most about this article is the detailed…
- Google Patches Linux kernel with 40% TCP performance · 14 minGet my backend course https://backend.win Google submitted a patch to Linux Kernel 6.8 to improve TCP performance by 40%, this is done via rearranging the tcp structures for…
- Database Torn pages · 16 min0:00 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 MySQL InnoDB Doublewrite buffer 10:45 Postgres…
- Cloudflare Open sources Pingora (NGINX replacement) · 31 minGet my backend course https://backend.win Cloudflare has announced they are opening sources Pingora as a networking framework! Big news, let us discuss 0:00 Intro 0:30 Reasons…
- The Internals of MongoDB · 45 minhttps://backend.win https://databases.win I’m a big believer that database systems share similar core fundamentals at their storage layer and understanding them allows one to…
- The Beauty of Programming Languages · 18 minIn this video I explore the type of languages, compiled, garbage collected, interpreted, JIT and more.
- The Danger of Defaults - A PostgreSQL Story · 12 minI talk about default values and how PostgreSQL 14 got slower when a default parameter has changed. Mike's blog…
- Database Background writing · 9 minBackground 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 OS) I go into this process in…
- The Cost of Memory Fragmentation · 39 minFragmentation is a very interesting topic to me, especially when it comes to memory. While virtually memory does solve external fragmentation (you can still allocate logically…
- The Real Hidden Cost of a Request · 13 minIn this video I explore the hidden costs of sending a request from the frontend to the backend Heard https://medium.com/@hnasr/the-journey-of-a-request-to-the-backend-c3de704de2…
- Why create Index blocks writes · 13 minFundamentals of Database Engineering udemy course (link redirects to udemy with coupon) https://database.husseinnasser.com Why create Index blocks writes In this video I…
- The Problems of an HTTP/3 Backend · 14 minHTTP/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 getting popular 3:40 HTTP/1.1 Cost 5:18…
- Encrypted Client Hello - The Pros & Cons · 33 minThe 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 through pros and cons of this new…
- The Journey of a Request to the Backend · 53 minFrom 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 request which is really just the…
- They Enabled Postgres Partitioning and their Backend fell apart · 34 minIn a wonderful blog, Kyle explores the pains he faced managing a Postgres instance for a startup he works for and how enabling partitioning sigintfically created wait events…
- WebTransport - A Backend Game Changer · 15 minWebTransport is a cutting-edge protocol framework designed to support multiplexed and secure transport over HTTP/2 and HTTP/3. It brings together the best of web and transport…
