Marketing built a sales dashboard nobody asked for

“It's on a weird port.”— Marketing Manager

Reason:

Allegedly because the last 10% is authentication, billing and everything else. Quietly rolled out to three countries.

Built by:

Tobias, a working student

Build time:

3 hours 34 minutes

Built with:

a Notion database with automations

Database:

Elasticsearch, because somebody wanted search

Authentication:

the temporary firewall rule has existed for 15 months

Deployment:

sharing a reverse proxy with the company Christmas raffle

Responsible:

Olivier, who thought somebody else owned it

Documentation:

comments in the code, in a second language

Security situation:

production secrets are in a Slack message

Future disaster:

It will email customer data to a market you do not operate in.

Age: 4.2 years · originally expected to last 3 weeks · 5 owners so far · survived 2 reorganisations · last meaningful change 74 days ago

Rated common mostly because: €679k per year, alive 72x longer than intended, 42 users.