Sales built a vendor onboarding portal

“It's basically an internal tool.”— Marco, Sales

Reason:

Mainly because nobody could find the right SharePoint folder in 51 minutes of looking. With 117 users and zero documentation.

Built by:

Marco, the management assistant

Build time:

one weekend

Built with:

Svelte, which nobody else here writes

Database:

a Postgres database called new-old containing 3 years of production data

Authentication:

the JWT secret is "changeme"

Deployment:

automatically restarted by a cron job because nobody fixed the memory leak

Responsible:

Miriam, who only knows the database

Documentation:

a Slack thread from June

Security situation:

the audit log also contains passwords

Future disaster:

It will silently stop syncing and nobody will notice for 2 months.

Age: 8.4 years · originally expected to last 4 weeks · 3 owners so far · survived 3 reorganisations · last meaningful change 74 days ago

Rated common mostly because: alive 103x longer than intended, 26 users, older than the department using it.