The Management Assistant built a meeting room booking system

“IT would have taken months.”— Chen, The Management Assistant

Reason:

Officially because the prototype has 85,691 production records. With 2 users, one of whom is the CEO.

Built by:

Chen, a field technician

Build time:

a long Thursday

Built with:

Python and a cron job on a laptop

Database:

browser cookies with surprising ambition

Authentication:

the production token is in the onboarding document

Deployment:

running on a VM with 1 GB of free disk space

Responsible:

Elena, who has not touched it in 5 months

Documentation:

a Loom video whose owner account has been deleted

Security situation:

the admin page is protected by not linking to it

Future disaster:

It will be migrated into the official system in 2034.

Age: 266 days · originally expected to last 7 days · 2 owners so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 3 days ago · original builder left 87 days ago

Rated common mostly because: €361k per year, alive 38x longer than intended, the builder has left.