Podcast profile
The Backend Engineering Show with Hussein Nasser
By 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.
Latest episode
SQL was a mistake
12 min
- Cadence
- Biweekly
- Typical length
- 28 min
- Latest release
- Sep 18
- Language
- EN
- Activity
- Current — released within 30 days
Podcast Classification
Topics
Database systems, storage engines, query processing, transactions, and database operations.
Frontend, backend, browser, web-platform, and full-stack application development.
Language design, runtimes, compilers, syntax, and language-specific engineering practice.
Formats
Detailed technical, architectural, or research-oriented examination.
Interpretation, opinion, debate, review, and analytical discussion.
Audience level
Regularly assumes specialist knowledge and discusses implementation, architecture, protocols, code, or research in depth.
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Latest episodes
Episodes shown — 10 of 25
Caching is a cop-out
In this episode I explore why you should take some time to examine the operation you are caching before doing so.
How a query optimization gave birth to infinite scroll
The infinite scroll in social media as we know it today is despised by all. But it always start as a bad idea. It originated as a result of UI change to relief the backend database from inefficient queries. I explore this in this episode of the backend engineering.
Postgres is half as fast in Linux 7.0
An aws engineer discovered a 50% regression in postgres throughput while testing the new Linux 7.0 kernel. The cause turns out to be massive TLB and page faults exacerbated by Postgres process-based design.
Don't let AI rob you
A discussion about why many engineers still love the struggle, the mistakes, and the process of figuring things out themselves. This is how we grow and get better and stronger. Letting AI do everything (even though it can’t) robs us this feeling..
New Book: Root cause
I wrote a new book that has been in the works for years. It is called Root Cause, and it is for those who enjoy the art of backend engineering. Early in my career, 20 years ago, I built backend and database applications without fully grasping their inner mechanics.
5 Backend Design Patterns for Managing Threads and Sockets
In this video I introduce 5 different design patterns for building backend applications. Each mode explains how a socket listener is established, a connections are established and how threads and connections are managed to read, write and process requests.
Page Tables
Page tables provide the mapping between virtual memory and physical memory for each process. This means it needs to be as efficient and as fast as possible. I explore the inner workings of page tables in this episode.
CPU and Kernel Page Faults
Page faults occurs when the process tries to access a memory that isn’t backed by a physical page kernel raises a fault which loads a page. It happens on first access, stack expansion, COW, swap and much more. However it comes with a cost.