Finance built a training completion tracker

“The password is really long.”— Daniel, Finance

Reason:

Officially because the existing report is a PDF of a screenshot of Headcount_backup_new2.xlsx. With dark mode and no error handling.

Built by:

Daniel, someone from Procurement

Build time:

one weekend

Built with:

plain HTML and 1,900 lines of jQuery

Database:

a database view called app_db-new_FINAL_FINAL

Authentication:

the production token is in the onboarding document

Deployment:

deployed straight to production on a Thursday, no staging

Responsible:

an agency acquired by another agency

Documentation:

an Excel tab called Instructions

Security situation:

the encryption key is stored next to the encrypted data

Future disaster:

It will be presented at a conference as a success story.

Age: 4.5 years · originally expected to last 7 days · 3 owners so far · survived 3 reorganisations · last meaningful change 19 days ago · original builder left 1237 days ago

Rated common mostly because: alive 235x longer than intended, nobody owns it, 2 departments depend on it.