Getting started with webhooks
It comes up on almost every project, usually later than it should. A short on-ramp to webhooks for teams who have not touched it before.
The question is rarely whether something can be built, but what it costs to keep running afterwards. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.
What it costs to ignore
Webhooks replace polling with something closer to real time. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.
Your first week
- Find out what is already in place
- Always verify the signature before trusting a payload
- Change one thing and measure it
Assume delivery can repeat and design for it. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.
In practice
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
If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.