R&D built Excel with a login screen

“The data is mostly public anyway.”— Sarah, R&D

Reason:

Allegedly because the documentation describes a button that no longer exists. Forked from a tutorial at 08:56 and never cleaned up.

Built by:

Sarah, a field technician

Build time:

19 minutes

Built with:

a Slack bot doing database writes

Database:

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

Authentication:

the production token is in Slack

Deployment:

running from an image tagged latest

Responsible:

the person sitting closest to the printer

Documentation:

three different architecture diagrams

Security situation:

the last security review happened before the application existed

Future disaster:

It will discover the backup password left with Chen.

Age: 2.5 years · originally expected to last 7 days · 3 owners so far · survived 2 reorganisations · last meaningful change 19 days ago

Rated common mostly because: alive 129x longer than intended, 3 departments depend on it, 5 users.