
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

Jul 12, 2022 • 7min
This decades old function in Linux is now 4 times faster
memchr() is a function that searches in a memory block for a character, this has been recently improved in the latest linux patch and we can learn something from this improvement I think, lets discuss.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-Kernel-Faster-memchr
Fundamentals of Networking for Effective Backends udemy course (link redirects to udemy with coupon)
https://network.husseinnasser.com

Jul 11, 2022 • 12min
Amazon Aurora Supports Postgres 14
Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition now supports PostgreSQL major version 14 (14.3). Let us discuss this news.
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2022/06/amazon-aurora-supports-postgresql-14/
0:00 Intro
1:00 Database on the Cloud options
3:45 Amazon Aurora supports Postgres 14
6:00 Postgres 14 vs Postgres 13

Jul 11, 2022 • 14min
Canada Rogers ISP Internet Outage - Early report and speculation
Rogers Communications, the Canadian ISP is down. One of its ASNs (they have many) is AS812 with over 5 million IP addresses. Tried a few and none of them can be pinged from the US (not sure if ICMP is disabled or not)
This is a huge deal for all Canadians and businesses affected. So sorry for every one who is affected by this, and kudus to all the engineers at Rogers working to fix this for the past what? 11 hours now?
If an ASN goes dark like a Facebook or a Cloudflare that isn't a big deal you can go without using Facebook for a day. But if this is your ISP's ASN that connects you to the rest of the World goes down, actual users won't be able to connect.
We still don't know the cause but my guess it might be a bad BGP entry? that's what happened to Cloudflare or FB, could be something different. again so sorry for all my Canadian followers affected. Will make a video when I get a chance
Resources
https://www.bigdatacloud.com/asn-lookup/AS812
https://www.bigdatacloud.com/asn-lookup/AS7018

Jul 11, 2022 • 35min
Index Fill Factor | The Backend Engineering Show
In this episode of the backend engineering show I’ll discuss Fill Factor index property, an important key parameter for a good performing database. I will also discuss how it is a double edge sword and can break or Make your db.
Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:48 Start of the Show
4:30 Database Storage Representation
6:30 IO Cost
10:00 Index Page
13:30 Page Splits Cost
18:00 Indexing UUIDs
19:45 FillFactor
23:15 Bad FillFactor values
26:40 Fragmentation In Indexes
30:30 Summary
Fundamentals of Networking for Effective Backends udemy course (link redirects to udemy with coupon)
https://network.husseinnasser.com
Fundamentals of Database Engineering udemy course (link redirects to udemy with coupon)
https://database.husseinnasser.com

Jul 4, 2022 • 11min
HTTP 103 - Early Hints
In this video I discuss early hints HTTP 103 status code, the problem it solves and the challenges it has.

Jun 30, 2022 • 12min
YugabyteDB supports read committed isolation
YugabyteDB is a postgres compatible and cloud native database. Read committed isolation level is a critical feature and adding it might lure more postgres customer’s to move to the cloud native database. But will they compete in front of Google’s new AlloyDB ? 0:00 Yogabyte implements Read committed 4:20 Isolation Levels 8:40 Can YugabyteDB compete with Google AlloyDB? https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/28/yugabytedb_215/ https://docs.yugabyte.com/preview/architecture/transactions/explicit-locking/

Jun 27, 2022 • 51min
Mutual TLS | The Backend Engineering Show
Fundamentals of Networking for Effective Backends udemy course (link redirects to udemy with coupon) https://network.husseinnasser.com
Transport Layer security or TLS is a protocol that encrypted the communication between client and server. TLS can also be used to authenticate the server, when the client also requires authentication this is called Mutual TLS and this is the topic of today’s show.
0:00 Introduction
2:00 What is TLS?
7:00 Server Authentication TLS
14:00 Advantages of one way TLS
19:44 Disadvantages of one way TLS
29:00 mTLS
31:00 Advantages of MTLS
37:00 The Problems of mTLS
43:00 Summary and my Thoughts

Jun 22, 2022 • 25min
Cloudflare Outage Analysis - Jun 21 2022
In this episode we go through the cloud flare outage blog. https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-outage-on-june-21-2022/ Fundamentals of Networking for Effective Backends udemy course (link redirects to udemy with coupon) https://network.husseinnasser.com

Jun 20, 2022 • 36min
When CSS loads last - HTTP Request Prioritization (RFC 9218) | The Backend Engineering Show
In this episode of the backend engineering show I go through the Extensible Prioritization Scheme for HTTP. This RFC addresses the problem in HTTP where the client prefers certain requests to be served before others. This RFC was designed by Lucas Pardue from Cloudflare and Kazoo Oku from Fastly. 0:00 The Request Priority Problem 13:00 How RFC 9218 addresses the problem 25:00 HTTP/1.x Backends 32:00 Summary RFC 9218 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc9218/

Jun 5, 2022 • 6min
What is a zero day attack?
In this video I explain what is a zero day vulnerability or attack. Fundamentals of Networking for Effective Backends udemy course (link redirects to udemy with coupon) https://network.husseinnasser.com
Remember Everything You Learn from Podcasts
Save insights instantly, chat with episodes, and build lasting knowledge - all powered by AI.