LIVE RELAY · WEBHOOKS & QUEUES
Webhook delivery, retries and dead-letter handling, built by people who've been paged for the silent kind of failure.
HOP 01 · PHILOSOPHY
Every webhook integration works perfectly in the demo. The sender fires, your endpoint answers 200, everyone claps. Then real traffic shows up: a burst of events during a deploy, a receiver that's mid restart, a network blip that eats the response before it gets back to the sender. None of that is exotic. It's Tuesday.
Most teams build for the demo and find the gap in production, usually at the worst possible hour. Relay Worker exists because that gap is predictable. You can design for it in advance instead of patching it after the fact, and the design isn't complicated: assume delivery will fail sometimes, decide what "fail" actually means for your system, and build the response before you need it.
That's the whole philosophy. Not clever. Just deliberate.
HOP 02 · WHAT WE ACTUALLY BUILD
A retry without an idempotency key just means you'll process the same order twice, or fire the same alert five times in a row.
We treat each of the four things on the left as a single decision, made once, applied everywhere. An idempotency key so a retried event can't double-book itself. Backoff that spaces retries out instead of hammering a struggling endpoint into the ground. A dead-letter queue so a message that keeps failing gets parked somewhere visible instead of vanishing. A signature check on every inbound payload so you're not processing events from whoever guessed your URL.
None of this is advanced. It's just easy to skip when the deadline is Friday and the demo works fine without it.
HOP 03 · ON SILENCE
"No alert fired" and "it worked" are not the same sentence. Only one of them you can prove.Field note, on-call rotation
HOP 04 · FIELD NOTES
Long-form notes from the pager rotation. Written for the engineer who has to make the call at 2am, not the slide deck.
HOP 05 · STAY ON THE LINE
Field notes on webhook and queue reliability, sent occasionally, written by hand, easy to leave.