Author never heard of Electrical Engineers? I have graduated at Faculty of Electrical Engineering, the Computer Science department, and got a title of a Master of Electrical Engineering. Pretty sure I can call myself an engineer...
Yeah, my guess is that they share the same concept - expose triggers via HTTP(s) to run user commands. The webhook handling put on some additional requirements on my project: to go a little bit beyond piping the input to the script :-)
I did something very similar for handling webhooks (but can also be used for anything else), check it out at https://github.com/adnanh/webhook
People have used it in various segments, from actual deployments on push, to home automation, someone even wrote a guide on how to control the Xiaomi Robot Vacuum using the Amazon Dash button :-)
Oh yeah, I feel you! I was also on DALnet, and saw the exodus to other networks, EFnet, IRCnet, Undernet, QuakeNet... But as you said, they just didn't feel "right". I.e. some of them had "weird-looking" services as opposed to the DALnet's ChanServ, NickServ etc... :-)
Do you remember "PHP-Nuke" craze, everyone was creating community portals where members were able to post news, polls, etc...