I've been wiring up integrations for a while now: Shopify, n8n, shipping and fulfilment APIs, carrier systems, and the long tail of platforms that should have talked to each other five years ago. The work is mostly invisible. When it's done right, nothing breaks and nobody notices.
This blog is the explainer for all that invisible work.
What You'll Actually Find Here
Not tutorials. Not "10 things every developer should know." This is dispatch writing: real problems, specific code, what broke, what didn't, and why. If you're here because your Shopify webhook is firing twice, your n8n workflow silently drops every tenth job, or two systems disagree about the truth, you're in the right place.
Here's the kind of thing that's been living in my notes for too long: webhooks are at-least-once, never exactly-once. If you treat them as exactly-once, you'll double-charge, double-ship, or double-email someone eventually. The fix is boring and bulletproof. Make the handler idempotent on the event id:
// Webhooks retry. Dedupe on the provider's event id before you do any work,
// so a redelivery is a no-op instead of a second side effect.
async function handleWebhook(event: WebhookEvent): Promise<void> {
const firstTime = await seen.add(event.id) // returns false if already processed
if (!firstTime) return // idempotent: safe to replay
await processOrder(event.payload)
}
That one seen.add guard is the difference between a quiet integration and a 2am phone call. Happy to save you the same.
The Plan
Posts will cover: integration war stories, MCP server internals, the biodiversity-credit land-screening pipeline I've been building, and the occasional "here's why I built it this way" explainer for projects on the site.
Subscribe below if you want them when they land. No drip campaigns, no weekly newsletters just to hit a cadence. Only posts worth reading.