> The place I worked have everything length prefixed and by the end of the 90s all the network parsing was code generated from protocol description files, to remove the need for manually writing string copying code

Would you expound on this please? I've seen people reserve the first element as the size of the buffer but then, say a char buffer, has a size limit based on the size of char itself. What advice would you give yourself if you were just becoming a senior developer today? I do embedded myself