
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 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
Latest episodes

Oct 19, 2020 • 8min
Moving from a Network Engineer to a Backend Engineer - Career Path Advice
In this video I explain how Network Engineers can move to be a Backend Engineer by capitalizing on their skills in networking. Network Engineers can build great and improve the communication protocols that Backend Engineers use for service to service communication. Network Engineers can also be specialized in Proxies, Reverse Proxies, Load Balancers and Caching Layers.

Oct 18, 2020 • 35min
Software Engineering is Overwhelming
Software Engineering is overwhelming and hard, I discuss how to ease up that burden and make it fun here.
0:00 Intro
2:20 Learning Software Engineering
17:55 Bugs
23:30 Design Activities
28:50 Summary
🎙️Listen to the Backend Engineering Podcast
https://husseinnasser.com/podcast
🏭 Backend Engineering Videos
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQnljOFTspQUNnO4p00ua_C5mKTfldiYT
💾 Database Engineering Videos
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQnljOFTspQXjD0HOzN7P2tgzu7scWpl2
🏰 Load Balancing and Proxies Videos
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQnljOFTspQVMeBmWI2AhxULWEeo7AaMC
🏛️ Software Archtiecture Videos
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQnljOFTspQXNP6mQchJVP3S-3oKGEuw9
📩 Messaging Systems
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQnljOFTspQVcumYRWE2w9kVxxIXy_AMo
Become a Member
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_ML5xP23TOWKUcc-oAE_Eg/join
Support me on PayPal
https://bit.ly/33ENps4
Stay Awesome,
Hussein

Oct 17, 2020 • 1h 26min
WebSockets - Live Stream (By Hussein Nasser)
In this live stream we will keep the theme about WebSockets, scaling, layer 7 proxying vs layer 4 proxying in websockets , interesting problems and just chatting!
0:00 Intro
13:00 Stream Starts
21:30 WebSockets
1:08:00 Securing WebSockets
1:13:00 Scaling WebSockets
Watch on YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brKJFkLQWYo&feature=youtu.be

Oct 15, 2020 • 41min
Database Partitioning Explained
In this video, I will go through Database Partitioning and explain it in details, pros and cons with a demo using PostgreSQL.

Oct 13, 2020 • 14min
Indexing in PostgreSQL vs MySQL
In this video, I explain how both Postgres and MySQL store their indexes and their effect on reads vs writes. Let us discuss
0:00 Intro
1:00 Tables
2:00 Indexes
3:20 Indexing in Postgres
5:00 Indexing in MySQL
6:35 What Happens on Update on Postgres
7:20 What Happens on Update on MySQL
9:00 Reads on Postgres
9:40 Reads on MySQL

Oct 12, 2020 • 30min
Discord Backend Architecture Discussion
In this Video I discuss Discord WebRTC and Voice chat backend architecture, it is a very interesting article, let us discuss it
https://blog.discord.com/how-discord-handles-two-and-half-million-concurrent-voice-users-using-webrtc-ce01c3187429
0:00 Intro
3:30 WebRTC As a Choice?
8:00 ReWriting WebRTC
11:20 Backend Architecture
20:00 Failover
26:00 My Thoughts

Oct 11, 2020 • 24min
PostgreSQL 13 Has Some Performance Boosts! Let us discuss it!
PostgreSQL 13 Has Some Performance Boosts! Let us discuss it!
Postgres 13 has been released and it has some interesting features how about we discuss it!
Resources
Press-release https://www.postgresql.org/about/featurematrix/detail/341/
Feature Matrix https://www.postgresql.org/about/featurematrix/
“The PostgreSQL Global Development Group today announced the release of PostgreSQL 13, the latest version of the world’s most advanced open source database.
PostgreSQL 13 includes significant improvements to its indexing and lookup system that benefit large databases, including space savings and performance gains for indexes, faster response times for queries that use aggregates or partitions, better query planning when using enhanced statistics, and more.
Along with highly requested features like parallelized vacuuming and incremental sorting, PostgreSQL 13 provides a better data management experience for workloads big and small, with optimizations for daily administration, more conveniences for application developers, and security enhancements.
"PostgreSQL 13 showcases the collaboration and dedication of our global community in furthering the abilities of the world's most advanced open source relational database," said Peter Eisentraut, a PostgreSQL Core Team member. "The innovations that each release brings along with its reputation for reliability and stability is the reason why more people choose to use PostgreSQL for their applications."
PostgreSQL, an innovative data management system known for its reliability and robustness, benefits from over 25 years of open source development from a global developer community and has become the preferred open source relational database for organizations of all sizes.”

Oct 10, 2020 • 1h 4min
HTTP - Live Stream
In this Live stream, I discuss HTTP and answer interesting questions about HTTP, TLS, UDP, QUIC, WebSockets and more from the community
watch the vod here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6G8DdLgdJ4

Oct 9, 2020 • 26min
Why Discord Moved from MongoDB to Apache Cassandra, Let us Discuss
In this Article Stanislav Vishnevskiy elegantly discusses why Discord moved from MongoDB to Apache Cassandra, the challenges they faced, limitations of both Mongo & Cassandra. Well written article let us discuss
https://blog.discord.com/how-discord-stores-billions-of-messages-7fa6ec7ee4c7

Oct 7, 2020 • 47min
We Need to Stop the Microservices Madness - Scaling with Common Sense
I stumbled upon this interesting article titled Scaling with common sense, the author goes into different topics of the bad practices of pre-mature scaling and optimization specifically with regards to microservices and k8. Let us discuss
Resources
https://zerodha.tech/blog/scaling-with-common-sense/
0:00 Intro
3:00 Comparisons are almost always meaningless.
5:30 Scaling starts with well built software.
8:50 Eat healthy and exercise daily.
10:15 KISS, don’t be afraid, and boring better cool.
12:00 The bottleneck is almost always the database.
13:40 RDBMS works, almost always.
15:00 Everyone forgets to index.
17:30 Don’t use an RDBMS. What?
19:40 Networking/IO is really hard. Network as little as possible.
21:20 Connections are hard. Connect little, pool much.
25:00 Latency is THE metric.
26:10 The Internet is the Wild Wild West.
28:40 Caching is a silver bullet, almost.
29:00 Dumb caching is best caching.
29:40 Some application state may not be bad.
31:20 HTTP APIs can be E-Tagged (304) too.
34:12 Allocation is expensive.
37:40 Multi-threading and concurrency are necessary, but hard.
38:30 Some technologies are genuinely slow. Use fast technologies.
39:30 Scaling horizontally, vertically, and “enterprisely”.
40:30 Human impediment.
42:20 My Thoughts on Microservices
🎙️Listen to the Backend Engineering Podcast
https://husseinnasser.com/podcast
🏭 Backend Engineering Videos
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQnljOFTspQUNnO4p00ua_C5mKTfldiYT
💾 Database Engineering Videos
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQnljOFTspQXjD0HOzN7P2tgzu7scWpl2
🏰 Load Balancing and Proxies Videos
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQnljOFTspQVMeBmWI2AhxULWEeo7AaMC
🏛️ Software Archtiecture Videos
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQnljOFTspQXNP6mQchJVP3S-3oKGEuw9
📩 Messaging Systems
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQnljOFTspQVcumYRWE2w9kVxxIXy_AMo
Become a Member
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_ML5xP23TOWKUcc-oAE_Eg/join
Support me on PayPal
https://bit.ly/33ENps4
Stay Awesome,
Hussein