The Mailroom built a custom workflow engine with one workflow

“The budget expires this week.”— Chen, The Mailroom

Reason:

Because the documentation starts with "TODO". Already exported 8,834 rows to somebody's laptop.

Built by:

Chen, a product owner

Build time:

a long Thursday

Built with:

Supabase, with the service role key somewhere unfortunate

Database:

the filesystem.

Authentication:

the guest account can see more than expected

Deployment:

deployed to staging, which customers are now using

Responsible:

Bastian, who thought somebody else owned it

Documentation:

an email chain containing the phrase "see below" 13 times

Security situation:

backups use the same password as production

Future disaster:

It will discover its own timezone policy in production.

Age: 1.8 years · originally expected to last 14 days · 2 owners so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 74 days ago

Rated rare mostly because: €435k per year, 76% chance of becoming business critical, alive 47x longer than intended.