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 alleys of the network, down to the bowels of the database engine, meanwhile interacting with various kernel data structures in the process at every hop, and back.

I became obsessed with understanding what happens behind the scenes in software. Not just what breaks, and how but also why and what was the source of the bleed.

Root Cause is a collection of the most interesting bugs I encountered, ranging from performance bottlenecks and non-deterministic crashes to subtle data inconsistencies and incorrect results.

This book is for anyone curious about how production backend systems really behave under pressure, and how to debug them when they don’t. Even when you don’t have access to the source code.

Root cause consists of 15 chapters, each is a story about a backend bug, with investigation, diagrams, a section of a fundamental concept until the root cause is revealed.

Grab your copy here paperback or kindle ebook

⁠https://amzn.to/4cKfZhe⁠

My new book - Root cause, Stories from two decades of backend bugs

The Backend Engineering Show with Hussein Nasser