The Canteen built a knowledge base with a search that does not search

“Google probably handles that.”— Miriam, The Canteen

Reason:

Because the process requires signatures from 9 people. With 139 users and 66 feature requests.

Built by:

Miriam, a recruiter

Build time:

one weekend

Built with:

a Rails app from 2016 nobody updated

Database:

filenames. The filenames are the database.

Authentication:

the password is the company name backwards

Deployment:

running in a Kubernetes cluster created for a proof of concept

Responsible:

Priya, who has never seen the source code

Documentation:

comments in the code, in a second language

Security situation:

authorization happens entirely in the frontend

Future disaster:

It will be discovered during due diligence.

Age: 1.2 years · originally expected to last 7 days · 1 owner so far · last meaningful change 19 days ago

Rated legendary mostly because: 99% chance of becoming business critical, 5 accidental connections, alive 65x longer than intended.