Protocol Buffers (Protobuf) offers significant advantages over JSON for API development through strong typing, binary serialization, and automatic code generation. While JSON remains popular for its human readability and flexibility, Protobuf provides 3x smaller payload sizes, type safety across multiple languages, and eliminates manual validation errors. The article demonstrates practical implementation using Dart and the Shelf framework, showing how Protobuf can be used independently of gRPC in traditional HTTP APIs. The main trade-off is reduced human readability of binary data, requiring schema files and specialized tooling for debugging.

Autobase 2.5.0 introduces Expert Mode to its UI, enabling advanced cluster configuration options for experienced users. Key features include a YAML editor for custom parameters, updated cloud provider pricing and instance specifications (Hetzner ARM instances, 4th-gen Intel on AWS/GCP), configurable IOPS and throughput for AWS EBS volumes, and Ansible 12 compatibility. Autobase is an open-source tool for deploying and managing highly available PostgreSQL clusters, automating tasks like deployment, failover, backups, and scaling without requiring deep DBA expertise.

Microsoft releases Fara-7B, a 7-billion parameter small language model designed for autonomous computer use through visual perception and direct interaction with web interfaces. The model achieves state-of-the-art performance in its size class across multiple web agent benchmarks, completing tasks in ~16 steps versus ~41 for comparable models. Trained on 145K synthetic trajectories using the Magentic-One framework, Fara-7B can automate web tasks like booking travel, shopping, and form filling by directly predicting mouse and keyboard actions. The release includes WebTailBench, a new benchmark with 609 real-world tasks, and supports both Azure Foundry hosting and self-hosted VLLM deployment.