
Understand webhooks like Stripe engineers do.
Hey Product Hunt! 👋
We just published a deep dive into one of the most deceptively tricky parts of modern developer infrastructure: webhooks.
They seem simple at first — just an HTTP POST when something happens — but once you start handling retries, idempotency, queuing, DLQs, signature verification, and observability, it quickly turns into a full-blown system on its own.
This post breaks down:
What webhooks actually are (beyond just a buzzword)
How they work under the hood — request structure, security, delivery guarantees
The challenges teams face when they scale webhook traffic
Best practices for building reliable webhook-based integrations
Real-world examples from companies like Stripe, GitHub, and Shopify
We're building Vartiq, a webhook infrastructure platform to solve these exact challenges — so if you’ve ever had to babysit failing webhooks or build retry queues from scratch, this might be useful.
Would love to hear your thoughts, horror stories, or battle-tested webhook lessons!
— JT from Vartiq 🛠️
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