How a query optimization gave birth to infinite scroll

More from The Backend Engineering Show with Hussein Nasser All episodes →

1. 

   25 Sep 2026 · 13 min

   Engineers will be out of the 'Loops'

   I discuss loops engineering and how it will numb creative thinking and critical system design for engineers.

2. 

   18 Sep 2026 · 12 min

   SQL was a mistake

   I like SQL but the standard should have included ways to hint instead of the abstraction of "let me do it for you"

3. 

   11 Sep 2026 · 16 min

   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. And why caching is a cop-out

4. 

   23 Aug 2026 · 18 min

   How open ai agents "hacked" hugging face

5. 

   17 Jun 2026 · 34 min

   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. In this backend engineering show episode I dive deep into how this was discovered, the root cause and the possible fixes and workarounds. Intermediate and Advanced Backend Engineering Course Bundlehttps://courses.husseinnasser.com/bundleMy Book, Root Cause: Stories and Lessons from Two Decades of Backend Engineering Bugs https://amzn.to/4cKfZhe 0:00 Intro2:30 The Discovery6:30…

6. 

   8 Jun 2026 · 32 min

   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..

7. 

   15 Apr 2026 · 10 min

   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. Performance issues, race conditions, bugs, and even data corruption often left me lost. Since that day, I resolved to truly understand how systems work. From networking protocols and intermediary proxies to backend services and various database engines. I made it a habit to follow every request on its journey through the dark…

8. 

   19 Jan 2026 · 46 min

   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.

9. 

   15 Dec 2025 · 47 min

   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. 0:00 Intro 2:00 Virtual Memory ⁃ ⁃ 8:00 MMU 10:00 Page Tables ⁃ ⁃ ⁃ ⁃ ⁃ ⁃ ⁃ 11:30 Single Table Byte Addressability ⁃ ⁃ ⁃ ⁃ ⁃ ⁃ ⁃ ⁃ 16:00 Single Table Page addressability ⁃ ⁃ ⁃ ⁃ ⁃ 19:00 Multi-level Paging (Radix tree) ⁃ ⁃ 31:00 Huge Tables ⁃ ⁃ 33:00 TLB ⁃ ⁃ Summary