

The Backend Engineering Show with Hussein Nasser
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
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
Mentioned books

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

10 snips
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

Sep 30, 2020 • 6min
How did I get served an Instagram Ad by browsing a completely different website?
In this video I explain how I was browsing a website (displate) and was served the exact same thing on my Instagram feed

Sep 30, 2020 • 18min
HTTPS and HTTP/3 negotiation is now Faster thanks to Cloudflare, RIP HSTS, Let us Discuss
Watch the Video here
https://youtu.be/76sgBHUl7iI
Alessandro Ghedini wrote an interesting article discussing how DNS queries can help speed up HTTPS and HTTP/3 communication let us discuss this article
https://blog.cloudflare.com/speeding-up-https-and-http-3-negotiation-with-dns/
3:30 TLS video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlE5X1NlHgg
4:57 HSTS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYhMnw4aJTw
8:15 http/2 c smuggling https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2VEQ3jFq6Q
15:30 ESNI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0zlO5-NWFU

Sep 29, 2020 • 13min
Microsoft 365 Outage, What Happened and What Caused it? Let us discuss
On September 28 2020 Microsoft 365 Service went down, what caused it? and what did Microsoft did to solve it.
Resources
https://twitter.com/msft365status/status/1310696819135901696?s=21
https://status.office.com/
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_account-mso_imobile-mso_o365b/error-aadsts90033/d2ba3ef2-fe85-411d-b4fe-5c44df1e121c
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_o365admin-mso_other-mso_o365b/aadsts90033-a-transient-error-has-occurred-please/8117f18e-9de9-46d7-9505-1708b2a1c732
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/35944/aadsts90033-a-transient-error-has-occurred-please.html

Sep 24, 2020 • 9min
When to Build a Stateless vs Stateful Back-ends using the right protocols (UDP, TCP, HTTP, QUIC, WebSockets)
In this video I explain how communication protocols are built on top of each other and how each protocol can be stateful or stateless. We need to understand this in order to know which protocol to use to build the right backend.

Sep 23, 2020 • 13min
Russia Follows in China’s footsteps and attempts to block TLS 1.3, ESNI, DoH & DoT, let us discuss
It looks like Russia is submitting a proposal to block TLS 1.3, ESNI, DoH , DoT, let us discuss Resources https://www.zdnet.com/article/russia-wants-to-ban-the-use-of-secure-protocols-such-as-tls-1-3-doh-dot-esni/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SORM


