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Root cause: Stories and Lessons from Two Decades of Backend Engineering Bugs
Paperback
Publisher Price: $34.99
Publisher: Hussein Nasser
Published: Jun 1 2026
Pages: 316
Weight: 0.93
Height: 0.66 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
The Software Engineering industry often evaluates engineers based on how many lines of code they write, how many years of experience they have, or how many features they ship. But I think a more powerful metric is the number of bugs they encountered, reproduced, traced to their root cause and fixed. Those experiences shape an engineer far more than raw output or time served in my opinion, let me elaborate.
Bugs hinder the stability of software, which affects the user experience. You may have a feature-complete product, but if it has bugs preventing users from completing tasks, the user experience suffers. You may have a modern software stack, but if the system isn't performing or stable, that too indirectly affects the user experience.
Root Cause is a collection of dozens of real-world software bugs drawn from nearly two decades of my personal backend engineering experience. Each chapter is centered on a specific failure, the observable effect experienced by users, and follows the investigative journey toward uncovering its root cause. These bugs span a wide range of systems and failure modes, from intermittent API timeouts and performance degradation to subtle state corruption and distributed system edge cases. I also introduce a fundamental backend engineering concept in each chapter that is related to the bug to make book can be picked up by any can be picked up and read by anyone without prior experience
Perhaps the biggest value you will learn from this book is the joy of pursuing bugs, I think there is an inherent deterrence when working with bugs, almost like its a chore or in some cases failure if you own the area where the bug was found. However, if you push through, detach from the bug and approach it as if you are approaching a new puzzle that has nothing to do with you, the rewards are plenty.
Another thing you may appreciate is the art of authoring a bug report, a craft that I continue to hone and an absolute enjoyable experience, especially if you understand the bug thoroughly. Writing the bug defect report feels like something leaves you and flows into paper or in this case github issue or jira. I found myself writing a report and coming back and reading it years later and remembering the joy I felt when I discovered the bug. Others also will appreciate it for sure.
I hope you enjoy Root Cause
-Hussein
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