

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

May 21, 2023 • 18min
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.
Fundamentals of Backend Engineering Design patterns udemy course (link redirects to udemy with coupon)
https://backend.husseinnasser.com

May 11, 2023 • 27min
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
In version 5.3, MongoDB introduced a feature called clustered collection which stores documents in the _id index as oppose to the hidden wiredTiger hidden index. This eliminates an entire b+tree seek for reads using the _id index and also removes the additional write to the hidden index speeding both reads and writes.
However like we know in software engineering, everything has a cost. This feature does come with a few that one must be aware of before using it. In this video I discuss the following
How Original MongoDB Collections Work
How Clustered Collections Work
Benefits of Clustered Collections
Limitations of Clustered Collections

May 6, 2023 • 36min
Prime Video Swaps Microservices for Monolith: 90% Cost Reduction
Prime video engineering team has posted a blog detailing how they moved their live stream monitoring service from microservices to a monolith reducing their cost by 90%, let us discuss this
0:00 Intro
2:00 Overview
10:35 Distributed System Overhead
21:30 From Microservices to Monolith
29:00 Scaling the Monolith
32:30 Takeaways
https://www.primevideotech.com/video-streaming/scaling-up-the-prime-video-audio-video-monitoring-service-and-reducing-costs-by-90
Fundamentals of Backend Engineering Design patterns udemy course (link redirects to udemy with coupon)
https://backend.husseinnasser.com

5 snips
May 2, 2023 • 39min
A Deep Dive in How Slow SELECT * is
Fundamentals of Database Engineering udemy course (link redirects to udemy with coupon)
https://database.husseinnasser.com
In a row-store database engine, rows are stored in units called pages. Each page has a fixed header and contains multiple rows, with each row having a record header followed by its respective columns. When the database fetches a page and places it in the shared buffer pool, we gain access to all rows and columns within that page. So, the question arises: if we have all the columns readily available in memory, why would SELECT * be slow and costly? Is it really as slow as people claim it to be? And if so why is it so? In this post, we will explore these questions and more.
0:00 Intro
1:49 Database Page Layout
5:00 How SELECT Works
10:49 No Index-Only Scans
18:00 Deserialization Cost
21:00 Not All Columns are Inline
28:00 Network Cost
36:00 Client Deserialization
https://medium.com/@hnasr/how-slow-is-select-8d4308ca1f0c

Apr 7, 2023 • 13min
AWS Serverless Lambda Supports Response Streaming
Lambda now supports Response payload streaming, now you can flush changes to the network socket as soon as it is available and it will be written to the client socket. I think this is a game changing feature
0:00 Intro
1:00 Traditional Lambda
3:00 Server Sent Events & Chunk-Encoding
5:00 What happens to clients?
6:00 Supported Regions
7:00 My thoughts
Fundamentals of Backend Engineering Design patterns udemy course (link redirects to udemy with coupon)
https://backend.husseinnasser.com

Apr 6, 2023 • 43min
The Cloudflare mTLS vulnerability - A Deep Dive Analysis
Cloudflare released a blog detailing a vulnerability that has been in their system for nearly two years. it is related to mTLS or mutual TLS and specifically client certificate revocation. I explore this in details
0:00 Intro
3:00 The Vulnerability
7:00 What happened?
8:50 Certificate Revocation
12:30 Rejecting certain endpoints
17:00 Certificate Authentication
20:30 Certificate serial number
24:00 Session Resumption (PSK)
35:00 The bug
37:00 How they addressed the problem
Fundamentals of Backend Engineering Design patterns udemy course (link redirects to udemy with coupon)
https://backend.husseinnasser.com

Apr 6, 2023 • 23min
The Virgin Media ISP outage - What happened?
BGP (Border gateway protocol) withdrawals caused the Virgin media ISP customers to lose their Internet connection. I go into details on this video.
0:00 Intro
2:00 What happened?
4:11 How BGP works?
11:50 Version media withdrawals
15:00 Deep dive
Fundamentals of Backend Engineering Design patterns udemy course (link redirects to udemy with coupon)
https://backend.husseinnasser.com

Mar 30, 2023 • 22min
GitHub SSH key is Leaked - How bad is this?
GitHub Accidentally Exposed their SSH RSA Private key, this is the message you will get .
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
@ WARNING: REMOTE HOST IDENTIFICATION HAS CHANGED! @
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
IT IS POSSIBLE THAT SOMEONE IS DOING SOMETHING NASTY!
Someone could be eavesdropping on you right now (man-in-the-middle attack)!
It is also possible that a host key has just been changed.
The fingerprint for the RSA key sent by the remote host is
SHA256:uNiVztksCsDhcc0u9e8BujQXVUpKZIDTMczCvj3tD2s.
Please contact your system administrator.
Add correct host key in ~/.ssh/known_hosts to get rid of this message.
Host key for github.com has changed and you have requested strict checking.
Host key verification failed.
In this video I discuss how bad is this,.
0:00 Intro
1:10 What happened?
3:00 SSH vs TLS Authentication
6:00 SSH Connect
7:45 How bad is the github leak?
15:00 What should you do?
18:50 Is ECDSA immune?
https://github.blog/2023-03-23-we-updated-our-rsa-ssh-host-key/

Mar 29, 2023 • 14min
Cookie Hijacking - How Linus Tech Tips got Hacked
How Linus Tech Tips channel got Hacked
In this short video we explain how was it possible for Linux to get hacked with cookies hijacking.
0:00 Intro
0:47 TLDR what happened
5:10 Cookies in Chrome
7:30 Cookies Hijacking
8:46 Session Tokens (Access/Refresh)
10:00 Remedies

Mar 19, 2023 • 49min
All Postgres Locks Explained | A Deep Dive
Get my database engineering course https://database.husseinnasser.com
In this video I do a deep dive in all locks obtained by postgres, I learned a lot while making this video and hope you enjoy it.
0:00 Intro
2:30 What are Locks?
5:30 Overview of Postgres Locks
9:10 Table-Level Locks
11:40 ACCESS EXCLUSIVE
17:40 ACCESS SHARE
19:00 ROW SHARE
20:15 ROW EXCLUSIVE
21:15 SHARE UPDATE EXCLUSIVE
23:30 SHARE
24:50 SHARE ROW EXCLUSIVE
25:18 EXCLUSIVE
25:30 Table Lock Conflict Matrix
28:30 Row-Level Locks
30:00 FOR UPDATE
33:00 FOR NO KEY UPDATE
34:00 FOR SHARE
34:40 FOR KEY SHARE
35:10 Row Lock Conflict Matrix
39:25 Page-Level Locks
42:00 Deadlocks
46:00 Advistory Locks
47:20 Summary
https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/explicit-locking.html


