Field Service built a deal desk approval portal

“The firewall should block it.”— Ravi, Field Service

Reason:

Officially because it was faster to build it than to explain it to Finance Business Partner. With a settings page that does nothing.

Built by:

Ravi, the management assistant

Build time:

one weekend

Built with:

Firebase, because nobody wanted to design a backend

Database:

a backup called backup-final-October.zip

Authentication:

the production token is in the onboarding document

Deployment:

deployed with a shell script called deploy-final.sh

Responsible:

Chen, who only knows the database

Documentation:

a spreadsheet cell containing "ask Priya"

Security situation:

the service account is also a real employee

Future disaster:

It will get SSO after somebody shares the password publicly.

Age: 9.2 years · originally expected to last 2 months · 3 owners so far · survived 2 reorganisations · last meaningful change 823 days ago

Rated common mostly because: 64 users, 3 departments depend on it, alive 56x longer than intended.