IT (yes, really) built a contract deadline reminder bot

“Everyone has admin because roles were slowing us down.”— HR Generalist

Reason:

Allegedly because the backlog contains 123,652 items and one priority. Forked from a tutorial at 16:33 and never cleaned up.

Built by:

Chen, the management assistant

Build time:

one weekend

Built with:

Python and a cron job on a laptop

Database:

an SQLite file called DO_NOT_DELETE.db

Authentication:

the admin page is hidden by removing the link

Deployment:

deployed by emailing Leads.xlsx to Thomas

Responsible:

Marketing Manager, because their name appeared first in the meeting notes

Documentation:

a Notion page titled "New docs"

Security situation:

production secrets are in .env.example

Future disaster:

It will get monitoring after the first outage.

Age: 1.9 years · originally expected to last 4 weeks · 2 owners so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 420 days ago

Rated common mostly because: alive 24x longer than intended, 1 users, 4% chance of becoming business critical.