Expense Management built a birthday cake reimbursement workflow

“The data is mostly public anyway.”— Elena, Expense Management

Reason:

Officially because the demo environment contains real customer data. With dark mode and no error handling.

Built by:

Elena, a controller

Build time:

one weekend

Built with:

a Power Automate flow with 73 steps

Database:

a second Postgres called app_db, for safety

Authentication:

the password is the company name backwards

Deployment:

running from an image tagged latest

Responsible:

an external agency with no contract on file

Documentation:

a README describing a version that no longer exists

Security situation:

it was reviewed once, by Elena, who built it

Future disaster:

It will be the only application that still works during the migration.

Age: 2.9 years · originally expected to last 4 weeks · 5 owners so far · survived 2 reorganisations · last meaningful change 420 days ago · original builder left 115 days ago

Rated common mostly because: €363k per year, alive 35x longer than intended, nobody owns it.