Customer Support built a company-wide announcement tool

“It's read-only except for updates.”— Regional Sales Lead

Reason:

Mainly because the existing report is a PDF of a screenshot of copy of copy of Stock_list_v2_final.xlsx. With a settings page that does nothing.

Built by:

Lukas, a field technician

Build time:

a long Thursday

Built with:

a Slack bot doing database writes

Database:

Firebase with the admin SDK key committed to Git

Authentication:

there is one account called "admin" and nobody knows who owns it

Deployment:

deployed into production because staging was broken

Responsible:

the person sitting closest to the printer

Documentation:

comments in the code explaining what the code used to do

Security situation:

the webhook secret is "secret"

Future disaster:

It will round money differently from Finance.

Age: 1.5 years · originally expected to last 2 months · 2 owners so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 420 days ago

Rated common mostly because: 292 users, €324k per year, alive 9x longer than intended.