Protobuf.com, a visual, interactive guide to Protocol Buffers

What it does

Learn the fundamentals of Protocol Buffers: the schema-first architecture, how a message translates across representations, and how schemas become code.

Learn about important Protobuf concepts in a more interactive and visual way. Learn how Protobuf works, from the language to the binary encoding. Protocol Buffers (Protobuf) is a schema-driven format for serializing structured data. Write your type definitions once and use the same ones across every team and language that touches the data. Generate types from the schema so your compiler catches wrong field names and wrong types before anything runs. Add fields and keep already-deployed clients working, as long as you follow Protobuf's compatibility rules. A client built against an older schema ignores what it does not recognize. Protocol Buffers, or "Protobuf", refers to two things: an…from protobuf.com

In the maker’s words, at launch

Protobuf is a fairly simple format, but the way people are first introduced to it often doesn't speak to them. That is how it was for me at first. I tried to address that in two ways: simple visual diagrams where a picture does the work better than prose, and interaction so you can get a feel for the language and how…

• 
  Buf2019 · buf.build · ▲87

  A new way of working with Protocol Buffers

• 
  ProtobufDecoder, Inspect Protobuf Messages2021 · github.com · ▲11

  A Google Protocol Buffers (Protobuf) payload decoder/analyzer - sandermvanvliet/ProtobufDecoder

• 
  ProtoCURL, a curl for Protobuf2023 · github.com · ▲98

  protoCURL is cURL for Protobuf: The command-line tool for interacting with Protobuf over HTTP REST endpoints using human-readable text formats - qaware/protocurl

• CN
  Cap'n Proto, by the ex-maintainer of Protocol Buffers2013 · kentonv.github.com · ▲286
• PP
  Pbkit – Protobuf toolkit written in Deno/TypeScript2022 · pbkit.dev · ▲69
• 
  Skir – like Protocol Buffer but betterMar 2026 · skir.build · ▲113

  Why I built Skir: https://medium.com/@gepheum/i-spent-15-years-with-protobuf-t... Quick start: npx skir init All the config lives in one YML file. Website: https://skir.build GitHub: https://github.com/gepheum/skir Would love feedback especially from teams running mixed-language stacks.

• 
  /dev/null▲482

  a social network for devs

  Dev tools · 3d ago · dev-null.sh

• 
  Whiteboard (YC W26) – an open-source IDE for thoughtful software design▲423

  open-source IDE for thoughtful software design. Contribute to devdotfast/whiteboard development by creating an account on GitHub.

  Dev tools · 28d ago · github.com

• 
  Reladraw – A diagram language where you decide where to place things▲411

  Contribute to reladraw/reladraw development by creating an account on GitHub.

  Dev tools · 26d ago · github.com

• 
  OpenBot▲362

  Grok Bot alternative: free, local, open-source, multiplayer

  Dev tools · 23d ago · openbot.run

• 
  Talanoa▲346

  Hi HN, I’m a fullstack developer, and honestly, I’ve lost count of how many side projects I’ve worked on over the years. But one idea kept coming back to me: a different kind of email client. It first came to me in 2014: “What if we could handle emails more like conversations?” Every year, I’d revisit this concept in my “Build Notes.” Ten years later, no one had built exactly what I had in mind — so I finally decided to do it myself. That’s how Talanoa was born. I wanted something focused on people, not timelines. I was tired of marking messages as unread just to remember to reply later, or…

  Dev tools · 20d ago · talanoa.email

• 
  CoreSpeed▲332

  One MCP for everything your agents need: apps, memory, tools

  Dev tools · 28d ago · corespeed.io

• TL
  The load-bearing vocabulary of Claude▲710

  Life & fun · Aug 2026 · louisabraham.github.io

• 
  Hey Noah▲656

  A proactive AI executive assistant for founders

  AI · Aug 2026 · heynoah.io

• 
  Clipto MCP▲655

  Hey HN, We recently built Clipto. It’s a tool that lets you search over terabytes of video, audio, and images on your computer, without relying on the cloud. Motivation: we probably all had this similar experience, we know a moment exists in a video or audio, but finding it takes hours scrubbing the timeline. You can send all the media to process in the cloud, but it’s slow, expensive and raises privacy concerns. So we decided to build our own on-device media search engine. How it works (high level): 1. We ingest video, audio, image; normalize formats via ffmpeg; run content analysis to…

  Work · Aug 2026 · clipto.com

• 
  Simple algorithm and color space to generate diverse skin tones▲627

  Hello HN! I found that picking out plausible but diverse skin tones for my digital art and game development projects was kind of difficult, and I got curious about if there was a way to define a color space that made it easy. I've built a color picker and procedural generation algorithm based on the space as well as a bunch of other fun js features and demos throughout the page that use the equations. If you find it interesting, I have lots of explanations of how I built it and what properties the space has. The methodology might be a bit shaky, but hopefully the result is as helpful for…

  Life & fun · Aug 2026 · toneyalexander.github.io

• 
  AdAnt AI▲620

  Claude for viral, high-converting social ads

  AI · Aug 2026 · adant.ai

• 
  Astute▲606

  Automate your B2B brand going viral, with new media creators

  AI · Aug 2026 · company-app.joinastute.com