I see the "nanoseconds counted so they didn't use protobufs" note, but in case you do you protobufs and want to make sure this never happens to you, I heartily recommend using the "reserved" keyword in your protos whenever you remove a field. Reserving a number is a note to the proto compiler that says "I will not use this number again, and please generate an error if I foolishly later try."

It's a useful and probably under-used feature.