Field Service built a vendor onboarding portal

“It's in the backlog.”— Kevin, Field Service

Reason:

Officially because Marco from Field Service is on holiday until July. With dark mode and no error handling.

Built by:

Kevin, a field technician

Build time:

an afternoon, mostly

Built with:

a Notion database with automations

Database:

booleans stored as "yes", "no", "Y", "N" and occasionally "maybe"

Authentication:

the password manager is a Word document

Deployment:

deployed straight to production on a Thursday, no staging

Responsible:

Operations, but they strongly disagree

Documentation:

an email chain containing the phrase "see below" 6 times

Security situation:

the API key is called PUBLIC_API_KEY

Future disaster:

It will fill the disk at 17:39.

Age: 3.1 years · originally expected to last 3 months · 5 owners so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 3 days ago

Rated rare mostly because: 473 users, 90% chance of becoming business critical, alive 12x longer than intended.