The Person Who Knows SQL built an expense approval workflow

“We can rebuild it properly later.”— Marketing Manager

Reason:

Officially because the fax machine is still somehow involved. Renamed three times to avoid attention.

Built by:

Miriam, someone from Procurement

Build time:

5 hours 34 minutes

Built with:

a Notion database with increasingly ambitious automations

Database:

a vector database because somebody said RAG

Authentication:

email magic links to Lukas's personal Gmail

Deployment:

on a VM created for a workshop in 2020

Responsible:

Plant Manager, because their name appeared first in the meeting notes

Documentation:

a folder called OLD_DO_NOT_USE containing the current documentation

Security situation:

it is indexed by Google. All of it.

Future disaster:

It will gain 52 users before anyone approves it.

Age: 9.3 years · originally expected to last 4 weeks · 6 owners so far · survived 3 reorganisations · last meaningful change 19 days ago

Rated legendary mostly because: 478 users, €564k per year, 4 departments depend on it.