I’m currently working on a pretty basic app that requires me to know when a user has gone live. I’ve been doing some research and see that web hooks are not implemented and that polling is required. My question is - would I poll the API via a cron job, or is there a different way of polling that I’m not aware of?
Implementation of polling is up to you. The Twitch API is a straight-forward REST implementation. You can use whatever allows you to make a REST call on a regular interval.