

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

Sep 22, 2020 • 11min
Casting Firefox to your TV, Roku or Game Console? Watch out for this major DANGEROUS bug!
What scared me about this bug is how EASY it is to execute, no MITM, no special software.. its all exploiting of existing software.. Let us discuss The SSDP engine in Firefox for Android (68.11.0 and below) can be tricked into triggering Android intent URIs with zero user interaction. This attack can be leveraged by attackers on the same WiFi network and manifests as applications on the target device suddenly launching, without the users' permission, and conducting activities allowed by the intent. Resources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_Service_Discovery_Protocol https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/gl-security/security-operations/gl-redteam/red-team-tech-notes/-/tree/master/firefox-android-2020 https://twitter.com/init_string https://twitter.com/LukasStefanko/status/1307013106615418883

Sep 18, 2020 • 22min
GoogleBot Crawler Now Uses HTTP/2 to Index the Web, Let us discuss how this affects our Back-end?
Google Bot is now attempting to use HTTP/2 to crawl the web
Ever since mainstream browsers started supporting the next major revision of HTTP, HTTP/2 or h2 for short, web professionals asked us whether Googlebot can crawl over the upgraded, more modern version of the protocol.
Today we're announcing that starting mid November 2020, Googlebot will support crawling over HTTP/2 for select sites.
Article
https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2020/09/googlebot-will-soon-speak-http2.html
* Intro 0:00
* What is a Crawler 1:06
* Current Crawler uses h1 2:00
* Crawler now uses h2 4:40
* Less connections, slightly high CPU usage 6:30
* Opting out of h2 crawling 9:00
* FAQ 11:40
Http/2 playlist 0;50 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQnljOFTspQWbBegaU790WhH7gNKcMAl-
http/2 not cheap 7;00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GriONb4EfPY
lucid chart 9;50 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gejfT1h6LBo
h2c smuggling 18:30 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2VEQ3jFq6Q

Sep 18, 2020 • 8min
How I Got "Slightly" Better at Communicating my Ideas Effectively as a Software Engineer
In this video, I explain how I got better at communicating my thoughts, opinions and ideas and how making content on YouTube Channel actually helped. I still have a long way but I found that making content and continuously trying to get better at delivering the core point helps.

Sep 17, 2020 • 28min
My Opinion on the “Stop Using React” Article
There was a recent article titled Stop Using React which spawned lots of discussions. I want to give my thoughts on this article and React in general. Resources https://dev.to/ender_minyard/why-you-should-stop-using-react-g7c
https://timkadlec.com/remembers/2020-04-21-the-cost-of-javascript-frameworks/ 0:00 Intro
3:20 Its Slow
8:30 Its expensive
12:00 its inaccessible
14:00 React goes against the web
18:00 made by facebook
21:00 my thoughts

Sep 14, 2020 • 14min
Best Practices Working with Billion-row Tables in Databases
In this video, I discuss 3 methods to work with tables of billion rows. This discussion is inspired by a comment on my YouTube video on Twitter System Design right here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfq-LG9ZJQA&lc=UgyYbm5889dW0XtKhsV4AaABAg
Chapters
Intro 0:00
1. Brute Force Distributed Processing 2:30
2. Working with a Subset of table 3:35
2.1 Indexing 3:55
2.2 Partitioning 5:30
2.3 Sharding 7:30
3. Avoid it all together (reshuffle the whole design) 9:10
Summary 11:30

Sep 13, 2020 • 6min
Another Unsecured ElasticSearch Cluster Exposed with 900GB worth of private data, let us discuss
It seems like these incidents are very common and not sure why ElasticSearch in particular. Let us discuss https://www.zdnet.com/article/leaky-server-exposes-users-of-dating-site-network/

Sep 13, 2020 • 27min
How I deal with Stress and being Overwhelmed during the Pandemic as a Software Engineer and a Content Creator
Some of you asked me how to deal with stress at my work and my content creation here on YouTube I share my thoughts with you
Intro 0:00
Stress from Work 2:40
Feeling down with no clear reason 7:13
Feeling anxious overwhelmed with stuff to learn 14:55
Pandemic 21:14

Sep 12, 2020 • 42min
Unimog - Cloudflare’s edge load balancer has blown me away, let us discuss
Unimog is a layer 4 load balancer built for Cloudflare scale. Cloudflare has written a great blog about it so let us discuss this technology. Video: https://youtu.be/Q0irm6xzNNk
Resources
https://blog.cloudflare.com/unimog-cloudflares-edge-load-balancer/
0:00 Intro
3:33 Layer 4 vs Layer 7 Load Balancers
7:00 Anycast
13:45 Packet Forwarding
23:30 XDP and Network stack
26:45 Maintaining established connection
31:00 Edge Computing
32:00 UDP Routing
33:00 Unimog Summary
34:00 Open Source Software
36:00 K8 Rant
40:00 Conclusion
Cards
6:30 L4 vs L7 proxying https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKMLgFVxZYk
12:30 vip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85XY7H2JPbs
13:30 tcp handshake https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bW_BILl7n0Y&t=5s

Sep 11, 2020 • 20min
WOW! h2c Smuggling is a serious flaw and very easy to execute, Let us discuss this
Jake Miller a security researcher discovered a serious flaw in proxies that allow h2c clear text upgrade and bypass proxy rules. Let us discuss
Thanks to @Textras for sending this article!
https://twitter.com/thebumblesec/status/1303305853525725184?s=21
https://labs.bishopfox.com/tech-blog/h2c-smuggling-request-smuggling-via-http/2-cleartext-h2c?hs_amp=true

Sep 9, 2020 • 21min
Kafka Consumer Group is a Brilliant Design Choice and We should Discuss it
Apache Kafka is an interesting software, every design decision the team makes perfect sense. I decided to dive deep into the discussion of the consumer group concept which is underrated and talk more about it.
0:00 Intro
1:24 Messaging Systems Explained
3:30 Partitioning
4:30 Pub/Sub vs Queue
6:55 Consumer Group
10:00 Parallelism in Consumer Group
10:30 Partition awareness in Consumer Group
11:30 Achieving Pub/Sub with Consumer Group
14:00 Head of Line blocking in Kafka


