Procurement built an approval chain with one approver

“Everyone has admin because roles were slowing us down.”— Katrin, Procurement

Reason:

Officially because the prototype has 25,147 production records. Built during an offsite instead of the thing they were asked to build.

Built by:

Katrin, a recruiter

Build time:

an afternoon, mostly

Built with:

Python and a cron job on a laptop

Database:

Airtable on Nadia's personal plan

Authentication:

the encryption key is in a comment explaining not to share it

Deployment:

last successfully deployed 623 days ago

Responsible:

a former employee still helping occasionally

Documentation:

an architecture diagram containing a box labelled "magic happens here"

Security situation:

MFA was disabled after somebody lost their phone

Future disaster:

It will be presented at a conference as a success story.

Age: 7.1 years · originally expected to last 2 months · 4 owners so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 19 days ago

Rated common mostly because: €417k per year, alive 43x longer than intended, older than the department using it.