Quality Assurance built a customer portal

“It's just a webhook.”— Marco, Quality Assurance

Reason:

Mainly because someone said "GDPR" and the meeting went quiet. With 72 users and 69 feature requests.

Built by:

Marco, a recruiter

Build time:

a long Thursday

Built with:

Airtable plus four Zapier zaps

Database:

SAP, indirectly, through 3 CSV exports

Authentication:

the security model is "Microsoft probably handles that"

Deployment:

running from an image tagged latest

Responsible:

Operations, but they strongly disagree

Documentation:

an architecture diagram containing a box labelled "magic happens here"

Security situation:

it was reviewed once, by Marco, who built it

Future disaster:

It will fill the disk at 11:27.

Age: 1.7 years · originally expected to last 3 months · 2 owners so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 420 days ago

Rated common mostly because: 90% chance of becoming business critical, alive 7x longer than intended, €2k per year.