🔗 Better than JSON

Or why I stopped using JSON for my APIs

If you develop or use an API, there’s a 99% chance it exchanges data encoded in JSON. It has become the de facto standard for the modern web. And yet, for almost ten years, whenever I develop servers—whether for personal or professional projects—I do not use JSON.

And I find it surprising that JSON is so omnipresent when there are far more efficient alternatives, sometimes better suited to a truly modern development experience. Among them: Protocol Buffers, or Protobuf.

In this article, I’d like to explain why.