HR built a customer portal

“It's just a form.”— Priya, HR

Reason:

Because the source of truth is an email attachment from July. With 3 tests, all skipped.

Built by:

Priya, an intern

Build time:

an afternoon, mostly

Built with:

an Electron app, for a form

Database:

a production table with no primary key

Authentication:

the role is a query parameter

Deployment:

running on an EC2 instance somebody resized manually

Responsible:

Sarah, whose laptop contains the only working environment

Documentation:

a calendar invite description from July

Security situation:

production secrets are in Git history

Future disaster:

It will cause Security to ask "what application?".

Age: 2.3 years · originally expected to last 4 weeks · 5 owners so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 3 days ago

Rated rare mostly because: 4 accidental connections, 5 departments depend on it, alive 28x longer than intended.