Sales built a customer portal

“We only need it until the consultant comes back.”— IT Service Desk

Reason:

Officially because the customer asked for one tiny change. With 114 users and 59 feature requests.

Built by:

Sofia, someone from Procurement

Build time:

a long Thursday

Built with:

Airtable plus four Zapier zaps

Database:

an S3 bucket called app_db-2 with public access "temporarily" enabled

Authentication:

"auth is on the roadmap" — has been for 88 days

Deployment:

last successfully deployed 317 days ago

Responsible:

nobody officially, Miriam emotionally

Documentation:

a 48 minute screen recording

Security situation:

the encryption key is in the source code

Future disaster:

It will survive the official replacement system.

Age: 252 days · originally expected to last 7 days · 1 owner so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 210 days ago · original builder left 125 days ago

Rated common mostly because: 4 departments depend on it, 2 accidental connections, alive 36x longer than intended.