I ship a lot of API/webhook integrations. Here’s how I make them NOT hurt in production 🔥

I ship a lot of API/webhook integrations. Here’s how I make them NOT hurt in production 🔥 If you do freelance backend long enough, you start noticing a pattern: Clients don’t pay for “beautiful code”. They pay for it working tomorrow . And webhook integrations are the fastest way to get random chaos: duplicate events out of order delivery retries that DDoS you and the classic “it worked yesterday 🤡” So here’s my real-world baseline for building webhook/API integrations that don’t wake me up at 3AM. No theory. Just a practical checklist + a simple architecture that scales. 1) Assume the webhook will be duplicated. Because it will. ✅ If you process every incoming request as “unique”, you’re cooked. Rule: every webhook must be idempotent. That means you need an event id or a hash that lets you say: “Seen it. Skipping.” Real workflow: extract event_id from payload (or generate a hash from stable fields) store it with a status on repeat: return 200 OK and do nothing Because if you return 50