R&D built a calibration tracker

“The password is really long.”— Marketing Manager

Reason:

Officially because the spreadsheet has 185,586 rows and 67 tabs. Quietly rolled out to five countries.

Built by:

Miriam, an intern

Build time:

4 evenings

Built with:

Airtable plus four Zapier zaps and one mystery webhook

Database:

localStorage. That is the whole backend.

Authentication:

MFA is enabled for 2 people

Deployment:

deployed straight to production on a Friday, no staging

Responsible:

Finance, according to IT

Documentation:

a Miro board that takes 2 minutes to load

Security situation:

a security review was scheduled for July and quietly cancelled

Future disaster:

It will outlive the vendor that was supposed to replace it.

Age: 36 days · originally expected to last 3 weeks · 2 owners so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 19 days ago

Rated common mostly because: 24% chance of becoming business critical, €31k per year, 1 accidental connections.