Connection Rework with Alex

Hello! Alex here.

I'm stoked to launch the 3rd iteration of our connections on Hookdeck 🎉. When designing the original version of Hookdeck, we had to make some assumptions about how it would be used. To no one's surprise, we got some things wrong, but today we are generating many improvements that make connections more flexible and usable. The rework is something we are extremely proud of.

What's new?

Simpler nomenclature

Labels and aliases have been removed in favor of a single Name field that behaves just like the old Alias. Names must be unique and URL-encoded. This allows every resource to be accessible by its name via the API and the CLI. It also reduces the cognitive overhead of creating new resources.

Clearer mental model

The Sources and Destinations are many relationships connected together. In the previous UI, that mental model was really unclear. By explicitly mapping those connections visually, the role of each resource is now much more explicit. This also leads to a much more compact UI that fits more than twice as many connections on the same screen while still feeling less crowded.

Introducing rules

Rules have been completely reimagined to be more flexible and intuitive, and to lay the groundwork for us to add many new rules in the future (spoiler: transformations, deduplication and more are coming soon).

Rules can now be applied to a ruleset or a connection directly. A connection will inherit any of its associated ruleset rules and apply its own custom rules (taking precedence over the ruleset rule). This means you can now choose specific rules per connection.

Read more about custom rules.

Pause

We now have a pause option! What does it do? Hookdeck will hold and queue events from paused connections and deliver them once the connection is unpaused.

This feature is great for scenarios where you have to migrate or upgrade your servers, but don't want to drop any webhooks!

Read more about pausing webhooks.

Archiving

With the connection rework, we added the ability to archive Sources, Connections, Destinations, and Rulesets to keep the Connections page clean and relevant.

I had lots of fun tackling this rework — if you have feedback or ideas for Hookdeck, reach out to me through the live chat. I would be excited to hear your thoughts. 🙂

Alex, Co-Founder

P.S. For the curious, here's what connections looked like before!