Protocol Buffer Design: Principles and Practices for Collaborative Development

Protocol Buffer Design: Principles and Practices for Collaborative Development

摘要

At Lyft Media, we’re obsessed with building flexible and highly reliable native ad products. Since our technical stack encompasses mobile clients on both iOS and Android, as well as multiple backend services, it is crucial to ensure robust and efficient communication between all involved entities. For this task we are leveraging Protocol Buffers, and we would like to share the best practices that are helping us achieve this goal. This article focuses on our experience addressing the challenges that come with collaborating on shared protocols in teams where people with different levels of familiarity and historical context, or even people outside the team, get to contribute. The problem of development process quality is prioritized over raw efficiency optimizations.