How to Build Payment Webhooks Fast
It's not that webhooks are difficult. It's that you don't implement them often enough.
Because the whole point of webhooks is that you don't write code to process them too often. Done right, it's copy, paste, deploy. Stripe has already released an AI assistant that should help you get the job done faster. As in "prompt, and forget about it".
But unfamiliar code is precisely where bugs accumulate. It's a defect's way of "hidden in plain sight".
The problem compounds when you realize that in order to have real-time payment processing, you need good, functional webhooks. You don't get to build them often enough to do them right, and you have no effective way to tell if the generated code is right or not, save going to production and hoping for the best.
Until now.
This is The Payments Engineer Playbook, and problems like these are exactly why the newsletter was born. There are so many situations where engineers could use an extra pair of eyes, helpful guidance from someone who's been there before, in the same trenches.
This week, I'm going to walk you through the mental model you need to understand webhooks. True, your PSP already has a guide for you to follow mindlessly.
But good engineers never do anything mindlessly.
In this article, you can find:
Why and How to authenticate webhooks (it's a bit trickier than Bearer Tokens)
What the code should look like after you followed your PSP's guide
Mistakes I've made, so that you don't have an excuse to make them
Enough intro, let's dive in.