Webhooks: what to get right first

Teams tend to reach for this after something has already gone wrong. If you only fix one thing about webhooks this quarter, make it the first item below.

Code gets read far more often than it gets written, and usually by someone with less context than the author had. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

Start here

Webhooks replace polling with something closer to real time. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

Then this

Always verify the signature before trusting a payload. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

Eventually

Assume delivery can repeat and design for it. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

The short version

Most development decisions are really maintenance decisions wearing a different hat. Three things worth confirming about webhooks before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Always verify the signature before trusting a payload — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Most of the value here comes from doing the first two things, not all of them.