Svix with Tom Hacohen

19 snips

May 1, 2025

Tom Hacohen, Founder and CEO of Svix, dives into the world of webhooks, unraveling their complexities and importance for businesses. He discusses how Svix tackles reliability and security in webhook management, sharing insights on the evolution of their service driven by user feedback. Tom contrasts Rust and Python for startups, emphasizing Rust's reliability and maintenance benefits. He also touches on the challenges of transitioning applications from Python to Rust, memory management intricacies, and the significance of stability in systems during periods of rapid growth.

Ask episode

AI Snips

Chapters

Transcript

Episode notes

INSIGHT

Webhooks Are More Complex Than They Seem

Webhooks are simple HTTP POST requests but involve complex challenges in scale, security, and reliability.
Handling webhooks poorly impacts customer satisfaction more than real product features.

ANECDOTE

How User Demand Sparked Svix

Early users asking for webhooks drove Svix's creation despite initial reluctance to build it.
A friend's simple need unlocked the business idea, even if she never paid for it.

INSIGHT

Rust’s Control Brings Responsibility

Rust’s control brings power but requires managing issues like heap fragmentation.
Switching allocators helped Svix reduce memory bloat and improve stability significantly.

Get the Snipd Podcast app to discover more snips from this episode

Get the app

We don't usually think much about Webhooks -- at least I don't. It's just web requests after all, right? In reality, there is a lot of complexity behind routing webhook requests through the internet. What if a webhook request gets lost? How do you know it was received in the first place? Can it be a security issue if a webhook gets handled twice? (Spoiler alert: yes)

Today I sit down with Tom from Svix to talk about what it takes to build an enterprise-ready webhook service. Of course it's written in Rust.

About Svix

Svix provides webhooks as a service. They build a secure, reliable, and scalable webhook sending and receiving system using Rust. The company handles billions of webhooks a year, so they know a thing or two about the complexities involved.

About Tom Hacohen

Tom is an entrepreneur and open source maintainer from Tel-Aviv (Israel) and based in the US. He's worked with people from all around the globe (excluding Antarctica). Prior to Svix, he worked as an Engineer at Samsung's Open Source Group on the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL) that are used by the Samsung backed Tizen mobile operating system.

Proudly Supported by CodeCrafters

CodeCrafters helps you become proficient in Rust by building real-world, production-grade projects. Learn hands-on by creating your own shell, HTTP server, Redis, Kafka, Git, SQLite, or DNS service from scratch.

Start for free today and enjoy 40% off any paid plan by using this link.

Links From The Episode

Microsoft IIS - Microsoft's HTTP server
Elixir - General purpose programming language based on the Erlang VM
Go Spec: Exported Identifiers - How to mark interface functions as public
Bob Nystrom: What Color is Your Function? - A good explanation of colored functions and the problems they introduce
jemallocator - Use jemalloc as the global allocator in Rust
serde-json - The go-to solution for parsing JSON in Rust
serde - High-level serilization and deserialization interface crate
axum - The defacto async web server crate
seaorm - SeaORM is a relational ORM to help you build web services in Rust
redis-rs - Redis library for rust
aide - OpenAPI generation from axum code
dropshot - Oxide API framework that generates OpenAPI spec
KSUID - A pure-Rust K sorted UID implementation
omniqueue - A queue abstraction layer for Rust
Python GIL - The Global Interpreter Lock Python wiki entry
Svix Blog: Robust APIs Through OpenAPI Generation - How to build stable APIs through schema generation and reviews

Official Links