Marketing built a customer portal

“We'll clean it up after launch.”— Elena, Marketing

Reason:

Because Friday at 17:20 seemed like a reasonable time to deploy. Already exported 171,215 rows to somebody's laptop.

Built by:

Elena, a team lead

Build time:

a long Thursday

Built with:

a no-code builder on a personal account

Database:

Firestore because the prototype needed to ship by Friday

Authentication:

the production token is in Slack

Deployment:

deployed into production because staging was broken

Responsible:

IT, according to Finance

Documentation:

tribal knowledge, technically

Security situation:

the firewall rule is labelled TEMP

Future disaster:

It will become impossible to shut down because 6 other tools depend on it.

Age: 46 days · originally expected to last 3 weeks · 2 owners so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 19 days ago

Rated rare mostly because: 84% chance of becoming business critical, €419k per year, 2 departments depend on it.