Hussein Nasser

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 Teachhttps://husseinnasser.com/courses

Author

Hussein Nasser

Category

Technology

Podcast website

database.husseinnasser.com

Latest episode

Jul 10, 2026

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Episodes

He Hacked Into Apple and Microsoft with this genius trick 11.02.2021

Guys this is absolutely genius and nuts! I have never seen anything like this before. This guy got access to paypal json and saw some private packages.. created public ones with a similar name and then made them do bad things, then thing because firewalls will shut those down.. he used DNS DNS requests are practically safe so firewalls allow them 11:05 chrome root https://youtu.be/qpC1YH0FhuY http...

CQRS is probably the cause of the Microservices madness 07.02.2021

Reads and Writes don’t have to live in the same database, data model or even the same service. Let us discuss CQRS no separation one service that does read/write partial separation You can keep one service but backend have multiple connections with different users same database full separation Read services / write services two databases OLAP / OLTP Pros scalability security Cons complex and very...

Can China Block the New Encrypted Client Hello TLS Extension? Let us Discuss 07.02.2021

In this video, I will discuss the new TLS extension Encrypted Client Hello which is a new mechanism to encrypt the entire client hello, very interesting and elegantly design but I have my few reservations and criticisms. Let us discuss. Intro 0:00 Classic TLS with SNI 7:00 ESNI 9:30 ECH 12:30 Limitations and Problems 21:00 Let's say the backend server hosts example.com with the cert of example.com...

UUIDs are Bad for Performance in MySQL - Does Postgres Win? Let us Discuss 04.02.2021

MySQL is clustered by default on the primary key which means inserts have to be ordered, let us discuss why UUID (random in nature) has bad performance in MySQL and whether postgres wins here. We will also explain why Sequential Writes are Faster than Random in MYSQL and     https://www.percona.com/blog/2019/11/22/uuids-are-popular-but-bad-for-performance-lets-discuss/

They Freed up 70GB of Unused Indexes Space on Postgres, How did they Do it? 02.02.2021

This is a very interesting article that I encourage you to read it as it has lots of useful lessons in postgres. Using partial indexes, full vacuum, dropping unused indexes and much more helped this company save 70G worth of disk space.    https://hakibenita.com/postgresql-unused-index-size

How do I learn new tech as a software engineer 01.02.2021

In this video I discuss my approach of learning new technology and how I break it down so I understand it. Hope it helps

Overview of InterPlanetary File System - IPFS with (Examples with Command line & Brave Browser) 31.01.2021

The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is a protocol and peer-to-peer network for storing and sharing data in a distributed file system. IPFS uses content-addressing to uniquely identify each file in a global namespace connecting all computing devices. Intro 0:00 Why IPFS? 2:00 Explain the original web model and the limitation * Content addressing instead of location addressing * decentralized cont...

This Certificate Authority is being banned from Google 29.01.2021

It looks like digital certificates and other certificate authorities issued by Spanish certificate authority Camerfirma will stop working in Chrome 90, in April.   https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-bans-another-misbehaving-ca-from-chrome/  https://wiki.mozilla.org/CA:Camerfirma_Issues

Is SELECT * Expensive? 28.01.2021

I explain why and when SELECT * can become expensive. 

This YouTube Backend API Leaks Private Videos - Research rewarded $5000 24.01.2021

David Schuts, a security researcher earned $5000 dollars in Google VRP by finding a Backend YouTube API that leaks Private Video Thumbnails. let us discuss how did he do that.   Resources https://bugs.xdavidhu.me/google/2021/01/11/stealing-your-private-videos-one-frame-at-a-time/ Twitter @xdavidhu https://twitter.com/xdavidhu

He found a way to Hijack Private Google Docs Screenshots with a clever hack - Google paid him $4000 24.01.2021

A vulnerability in Google Feedback component in postMessage allowed this security researcher to find a way to hijack private screenshots   https://blog.geekycat.in/google-vrp-hijacking-your-screenshots/ https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/postMessage

Brave is Decentralized - Users can Consume and HOST IPFS Decentralized Web Content through Brave 22.01.2021

Brave supports IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) which is a protocol designed to replaced HTTP as a decentralized alternative. This allows users to host and consume   Resources https://brave.com/brave-integrates-ipfs/ https://ipfs.io/#how

RIP FTP - Chrome depreciates FTP for good 19.01.2021

The current FTP implementation in Google Chrome has no support for encrypted connections (FTPS), nor proxies. Usage of FTP in the browser is sufficiently low that it is no longer viable to invest in improving the existing FTP client. In addition more capable FTP clients are available on all affected platforms.  Google Chrome 72+ removed support for fetching document subresources over FTP and...

The 2021 Slack Outage (Detailed analysis) 15.01.2021

On Jan 4th 2021, Slack experienced a global outage that prevented customers from using the service for nearly 5 hours. Slack has released the Root cause analysis incident report which I’m going to summarize in the first part of this video. After that Ill provide a lengthy deep dive of the incident so make sure to stick around for that. If you are new here, I make backend engineering videos and als...

HAProxy is closer to QUIC and HTTP/3 Support - Let’s discuss HAProxy 2.3 14.01.2021

In this video I go through the new most exciting features in HAProxy, one of my favorite proxies. HAProxy 2.3 adds exciting features such as forwarding, prioritizing, and translating of messages sent over the Syslog Protocol on both UDP and TCP, and OpenTracing SPOA, Stats Contexts, SSL/TLS enhancements, an improved cache, and changes in the connection layer that lay the foundation for support for...

Apache Kafka 2.7 is One Step Closer to Killing ZooKeeper 13.01.2021

In this video I go through the new features in Apache Kafka 2.7, it is very interesting to see the amount of work Apache Kafka is doing to get closer to removing ZooKeeper   *  [KAFKA-9893] - Configurable TCP connection timeout and improve the initial metadata fetch * [KAFKA-9915] - Throttle Create Topic, Create Partition and Delete Topic Operations * [KAFKA-10054] - Add TRACE-level...

Is EventStoreDB the First Native gRPC Database? 12.01.2021

I discussed this in many of my videos, the need for a database that natively supports a multiplexing protocol such as QUIC, gRPC or HTTP/2 in order to allow multiple isolated clients to make requests to the database without taking the overhead of establishing multiple connections.    Resources https://www.infoq.com/news/2021/01/eventstoredb/ https://developers.eventstore.com/clients/dotn...

Demonstrate your Skills as Backend Engineer To Recruiters - Building a Full Backend Portfolio 10.01.2021

A lot of you guys ask me this question. “I have experience but not sure how to show it, how do I build my backend portfolio such that I can get hired in my dream job. “ Building a backend portfolio takes time and effort and In this video I will be discussing 9 tools that you can add to your backend portfolio 0:00 Intro Live Projects 1:50 System Design Documents 3:45 Architectural/System Design Dia...

WhatsApp’s Ultimatum, What can They see and What are They Collecting (In Details) 09.01.2021

WhatApp has updated their terms of usage and privacy policy which caused many users to move to other platforms. This video will be a detailed report of their privacy policy, what they collect and what they can collect and see. https://www.whatsapp.com/legal/privacy-policy https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Image-from-iOS.png cards 1:30 end to end 16:30 Samesite cookie 0:00 What...

Have a Node JS Server? Update it Now! 07.01.2021

NodeJS Jan 2021 released its security update and its time to go through them!   Resources https://nodejs.org/en/blog/vulnerability/january-2021-security-releases/use-after-free in TLSWrap (High) (CVE-2020-8265) HTTP Request Smuggling in nodejs (Low) (CVE-2020-8287) OpenSSL - EDIPARTYNAME NULL pointer de-reference (CVE-2020-1971)

The Slack Outage (Early Report & Speculations) 05.01.2021

On Jan 4th 2021 7:14 PST All Slack services went down. This video is an early report of the incident and speculation of what might have caused this outage. We still don’t know what caused the outage, we will wait for the full incident report from slack and I'll make a video once that's up.  https://status.slack.com/

My Thoughts on How Clever the SolarWinds Hack Really Is 04.01.2021

The SolarWinds hack is one of the largest highly coordinated and intelligent attempt to hit enterprise companies. In this video, I briefly explain how smart this is.

Got Bit by A Docker Default on my Postgres Container, Interesting Story, let us discuss! 03.01.2021

While working on a Postgres docker container executing some queries I noticed that my index-only scan query is hitting the heap which it shouldn't. After digging deep I found that it's the shared memory that docker allocates by default. Defaults are never enough, very interesting train of thought that I thought I’d share with you  The Blog I found that helped me find it https://blog.makandra....

2021's Exciting Backend Tech - Serverless, QUIC, Microservices, The Backend Engineering Show 02.01.2021

Let us discuss what I'm excited for in Backend Tech in 2021 and answer your great questions

My Process of Designing and Architecting Software 29.12.2020

In this video, I go through my process of how I design and architect full software from A-Z. This is part of a Twitter thread that you guys seem to enjoy so I decided to make a video on the topic. Although the spec I generate is usually Backend oriented this is applicable for all software.  Twitter thread https://twitter.com/hnasr/status/1339021983195918337?s=20

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