How Data Validation Nearly Destroyed Protobuf

Required fields in protobuf have caused countless outages - sadly we don't have any public postmortems from the outages. Optional fields are what you should use, otherwise you will definitely need to deal with incidents.

[@KangoV]

Probuf best practices: "Don't Add a Required Field", "Don’t Change the Type of a Field", "Rarely Use an Integer Field for an ID"

[@cole.maxwell]

Appreciate your videos, I like the animation, readable code snippets, and beyond tutorial hell topics. Keep it up!

[@MrCompSciGuy]

Glad you like them! Appreciate the kind comment 😊

[@mti2fw]

Nice! Flatbuffers have the same problem?

[@vasiliigulevich9202]

AFAIK, required field has smaller footprint than optional, making the choice a serialization concern, not a validation one.

[@MrCompSciGuy]

No, it uses the same serialization under the hood (tag, your field). And anyways, if you are concerned about the tag size you're dealing with a low enough latency that you probably have one of the few use-cases where rolling your own (de)serialization makes sense

[@vasiliigulevich9202]

@@MrCompSciGuy thanks