What Is a Webhook? (And How It Differs From an API)
Find out what is a webhook and why it's one of the most misunderstood concepts in web development. Most developers conflate webhooks with APIs — they're related, but they work in opposite directions, and mixing them up leads to polling loops that waste roughly 98% of their requests. This video breaks down how the two actually compare, walks through how webhooks send data the moment an event fires, and covers the real-world setup: registering a URL, choosing events, verifying signatures, and handling retries safely.
📌 WHAT YOU'LL LEARN
The difference between polling and event-driven push, and why it matters for cost and latency
How a webhook delivers data to your endpoint the instant an event happens (Stripe, GitHub, Shopify examples)
How to register a webhook URL and select specific events in a provider dashboard
Why your endpoint must be publicly reachable and how to test locally with the Stripe CLI or ngrok
How providers sign webhook payloads and why you must verify with a timing-safe comparison on raw bytes
How to respond with a 2xx fast and queue slow work to avoid unwanted retries
🔗 Links
Stripe webhook docs: https://stripe.com/docs/webhooks
ngrok (local tunnel for testing): https://ngrok.com
Stripe CLI: https://stripe.com/docs/stripe-cli
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