Marketing built a meeting room booking system

“It's only one container.”— Regional Sales Lead

Reason:

Because the approval chain includes 4 people and one shared mailbox. Forked from a tutorial at 16:06 and never cleaned up.

Built by:

Marco, a warehouse supervisor

Build time:

5 evenings

Built with:

Excel macros, exposed over HTTP

Database:

a MySQL database called prod on a machine under a desk

Authentication:

the certificate is self-signed and everybody clicked through

Deployment:

hosted in Katrin's Azure subscription

Responsible:

Head of Operations, who calls it "the little tool"

Documentation:

a Confluence page copied from another project

Security situation:

production secrets are in the frontend bundle

Future disaster:

It will hold the only copy of Stock_list_v2.xlsx.

Age: 3.9 years · originally expected to last 3 weeks · 2 owners so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 3 days ago

Rated common mostly because: 5 departments depend on it, alive 67x longer than intended, €45k per year.