The Backend Engineering Show with Hussein Nasser

Firefox has disabled TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 to improve your website connections. Sites that don't support TLS version 1.2 will now show an error page.  We reverted the change for an undetermined amount of time to better enable access to critical government sites sharing COVID19 information. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grVVuGnN9IE https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/74.0/releaseno...

Copy and Paste Code, Tutorial Hell, Frontend Frameworks, GitHub Pull request Trolling and more

New software chat series let me know if you like it

In this video, I discuss the path of becoming a backend engineer through concepts and fundamentals. These are not tools 🧰 these are backend concepts and fundamentals technologies.    - Communication Protocols 3:30     - TCP,UDP     - QUIC     - HTTP     - WebSockets     - gRPC - Web...

FireFox DNS over HTTPS is a great step to a more secure web however it is absolutely useless without this ESNI. I also discuss doh in this video, esni and why this might not be a good idea https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/02/25/firefox-continues-push-to-bring-dns-over-https-by-default-for-us-users/

In this video I want to talk over the active active active vs active passive cluster configuration for high availability. We will also explain the pros & cons of using an active-active cluster vs using an active-passive cluster.

A sidecar proxy is an application design pattern which abstracts certain networking features, such as inter-service communications, monitoring and security, timeouts, retries, communication protocols, away from the main architecture to ease the maintenance of the application as a whole. In this video I’d like to talk about how we classically do things: Library Pattern getComments HTTP1:1/JSON Add...

MySQL 8.0 supports atomic Data Definition Language (DDL) statements. This feature is referred to as atomic DDL . An atomic DDL statement combines the data dictionary updates, storage engine operations, and binary log writes associated with a DDL operation into a single, atomic transaction. The transaction is either committed, with applicable changes persisted to the data dictionary, storage engine...

gRPC ( gRPC Remote Procedure Calls [1]) is an open source remote procedure call (RPC) system initially developed at Google in 2015[2]. It uses HTTP/2 for transport, Protocol Buffers as the message format. In this video I want to explore gRPC, go through examples, pros and cons of gRPC. Client/ Server communication SOAP HTTP (REST) WebSockets Client Libraries gRPC gRPC Demo todos gRPC Pros and Cons...

Firefox version 73.1 fixes a bug that prevented users from signing into Royal Canadian Bank  (Firefox fixed a bug that prevented Canadians from signing in to their bank royal Canadian bank) what caused it? Lets get into it   * Users will sign in and will get blank page.  * Cause Beacon API and HTTP/2  * Bug has been there forever    Sources https://bugzilla.mozil...

Some cool new features are coming to the Javascript language namely Optional chaining and nullish coalescing how useful are they? lets discuss So Optional chaining and nullish coalescing are coming to the Javascript language. I think it is already in the Javascript Engines (V8, SpiderMonkey, JavascriptCore and Chakra) which will be picked up by other clients such as browsers, node js , dino other...

We are one step closer to a more secure web. Firefox disabled TLS 1.0 1.1 It’s a big change that I am very happy about but not everyone is. Let's discuss . Resources https://hacks.mozilla.org/2020/02/its-the-boot-for-tls-1-0-and-tls-1-1/ https://www.openssl.org/~bodo/ssl-poodle.pdf Firefox disabled TLS 1.0 1.1 It’s a big change that I am very happy about but not everyone is. Lets discuss Resources...

Google engineer Alyssa Wilk discovers a critical security bug related to whitespaces in header values. Envoy and Node JS fix this by releasing a security patch. let us discuss it. tags: envoy, envoy proxy, envoy security, envoy proxy whitespace, Alyssa Wilk

Node JS Releases a Fix for an HTTP Request Smuggling Vulnerability, we discuss the attack and the fix in detail.

In April 2019 Google blocked sign-ins from Embedded Browsers to avoid man in the middle phishing attacks. In this video, we discuss why.    https://security.googleblog.com/2019/04/better-protection-against-man-in-middle.html?m=1

PostgresSQL version 12 has been released, let's go through the features that I think are most interesting and cool. #softwarenews   Feature Matrix https://www.postgresql.org/about/featurematrix/   - Allow adding columns to Index (GIST) https://www.postgresql.org/about/featurematrix/detail/314/  - COPY FROM WHERE COPY FROM ... WHERE  - More native support of JSON objects https://www.postgresql.org/...

Google just released the latest version of Chrome (80) and one of the interesting features making a big change to the default cookies that might actually prevent CSRF forever. Let’s discuss this.   #softwarenews  *  Same Site Attribute * Break some apps * Devs must explicitly set None;secure * Will this end CSRF    Resources  https://youtu.be/GPz7onXjP_4&nbs...

Load balancing is process of balancing incoming requests to multiple machines, processes or services. In this video we will explain two types of load balancers, layer 4 and layer 7. Layer 4 - haproxy, NLB  Pros  - great for simple packet-level load balancing  - Fast and efficient doesn’t look at the data  - More secure as it cant really look at your packets. So if it was compro...

NginX is an open source web server written in C and can also be used as a reverse proxy and a load balancer. In this video, I want to go through the following topics in NginX What is NginX? 2:25 Current & Desired Architecture 4:58 Layer 4 and Layer 7 Proxying in Nginx 8:40 Example 10:25 Install Nginx (mac) 13:30 Nginx as a Web Server 15:00 (webserver.conf) Static context location root 20:00 re...

In this podcast I explain what database partitioning is and illustrate the difference between Horizontal vs Vertical Partitioning, benefits and much more.   Why Partitioning?

ARP Address Resolution Protocol is a protocol that maps IP address to a mac address so hosts can be addressed. I want to make a video explaining ARP because it is starting to surface a lot in different videos that I’m making such as man in the middle, load balancing, and security.  

In this video I want to go through what really happens under the hood when you type google.com and you hit enter in a browser. This is inspired by alex’s github page below, it is a great detailed description of what happens. I did however add more details to certain areas and I removed some stuff like keyboard events and low level operating system like that. So if you are interested stay tuned! ht...

Failover is the technique of switching to a redundant backup machine when a certain node goes down. This is a very common implementation for achieving high availability and it is often mixed with different load balancing techniques such as layer 4 and layer 7 balancing.  In this video i want to go through following  * What is Failover? 1:47
 * ARP - Address Resolution Protocol 3:00
 * VIP & VRRP 5...

HAProxy is free, open source software written in C that provides a high availability  layer 4 and layer 7 load balancing and proxying . It has a reputation for being fast and efficient (in terms of processor and memory usage). In this video I want discuss the following Current & Desired Architecture 2:30 HAProxy Architecture  5:50 HAProxy as TCP Proxy & HTTP Proxy (Layer 4 vs Layer 7) 17:00 ACL (A...

HSTS or HTTP Strict Transport Security is a mechanism to force clients to communicate in HTTPS with a web server if both support this protocol.   In this podcast, I talk through this tech.