Signs it is time to revisit webhooks

This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. A few signals that webhooks is due some attention.

Most development decisions are really maintenance decisions wearing a different hat. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

The signals

• Nobody can say when it was last reviewed
• The answer depends on who you ask
• Webhooks replace polling with something closer to real time
• Always verify the signature before trusting a payload

What good looks like

Assume delivery can repeat and design for it. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

What this looks like day to day

Code gets read far more often than it gets written, and usually by someone with less context than the author had. Three things worth confirming about webhooks before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Assume delivery can repeat and design for it — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.