Hookdeck's Webhook Guides for 2022

We started Hookdeck because we noticed that it was hard to get simple, easily understandable information related to webhooks. Webhook resources were fragmented, and most of the content was platform-specific. Due to the straightforward nature of webhooks (it's only an HTTP Post!), not much documentation has been written because webhooks are often assumed to be easily understood.

But trying to piece together information from blog posts, personal trial and error, and asking Google specific questions is laborious and often fruitless. We believed we could cut these obstacles by creating a universal webhook resource, essentially a set of guides that could help developers with webhooks-related questions. With 14 articles now in our guidebook, we want to spread awareness and empower developers to bring their integrations to life.

What exactly is a webhooks guidebook?

The articles we publish are meant to act as a starting point for many webhook topics. What we call the webhook guidebook is over a dozen pieces of content that cover topics related to working with webhooks from development to deployment.

For access to all the articles in our webhook guidebook, click here.

How can it be used?

We recommend that developers who are starting to get into webhooks skim our guides from beginning to end. This should give a clear idea of what they are getting into and what to be aware of.

For more seasoned developers, the guides are a great resource to brush up on specific topics. For example, webhook security has been a great hit!

Where do we expect it to go?

We're extremely excited to see that the popularity of our guides has been steadily growing (thank you Google!). Helping developers by producing valuable content is something we pride ourselves on.

In 2022, we are planning to expand our guidebook’s focus and tackle articles related to webhook reliability in production. The challenges that tech teams face in production can cause the loss of webhooks, and these losses are often related to the scalability and resilience of the team’s infrastructure. We want to share our know-how to help tech teams tackle their issues so they can prevent losing a single webhook.

In our upcoming guides, we will cover how to build an ingestion service that won't miss any webhooks, including a queue that controls the throughput from ingestion to delivery, an essential retry system to replay failed events, logging capabilities to recover from errors, and alerting capabilities to stay on top of issues.

Here’s a sneak peek at some of the article topics to come:

• What does an infrastructure for managing webhooks look like?
• What are the infrastructure’s components and their functions?
• What are the requirements and performance metrics you should be taking into account?
• How you can go about designing your own solutions?
• Practical guides on building with AWS, RabbitMQ, and Kafka

After spending the last year focusing our guides on how to get started deploying webhooks, going forward we are excited to turn our attention to making sure developers are equipped to handle webhooks’ most infamous issues in production!

Conclusion

Hookdeck was built as a tool to help developers build and test their integrations. Our service removes the weight for tech teams who otherwise would have to build webhook infrastructure to handle webhooks at scale. Building the underlying infrastructure that makes webhooks reliable (including but not limited to ingestion, queues, retry, and logging) isn't an easy task. When you start thinking about a system's resiliency, you are faced with lots of decisions and compromises.

Because of our role in the webhooks landscape, we knew it was important for us to help the developer community by sharing our knowledge and what we’ve found works along the way. The webhooks guidebook is an extension of our software service, because Hookdeck is invested in helping developers succeed from research to production.