[xenoxcs]

I'm a big fan of using Protobuf for the third-party API validation task. After some slightly finniky initial schema definition (helped by things like json-to-proto.github.io), I can be sure the data I'm consuming from an external API is strongly typed, and the functions included in Protobuf which convert JSON to a Proto message instance blows up by default if there's an unexpected field in the API data it's consuming.

I use it to parse and validate incoming webhook data in my Python AWS Lambda functions, then re-use the protobuf types when I later ship the webhook data to our Flutter-based frontend. Adding extensions to the protobuf fields gives me a nice, structured way to add flags and metadata to different fields in the webhook message. For example, I can add table & column names to the protobuf message fields, and have them automatically be populated from the DB with some simple helper functions. Avoids me needing to write many lines of code that look like:

MyProtoClass.field1 = DB.table.column1.val

MyProtoClass.field2 = DB.table.column2.val