R&D built a demo environment that became production

“There's already a Confluence page.”— Group Controller

Reason:

Because the vendor quoted 14 months and two workshops. With a settings page that does nothing.

Built by:

Anja, a controller

Build time:

a long Thursday

Built with:

Airtable plus four Zapier zaps

Database:

a column called do_not_use that is required

Authentication:

the password manager is memory

Deployment:

running with 90% memory usage and "seems fine"

Responsible:

Finance, apparently

Documentation:

a Confluence page copied from another project

Security situation:

production secrets are in .env.example

Future disaster:

It will cause IT to ask "what server?".

Age: 4.7 years · originally expected to last 4 weeks · 6 owners so far · survived 3 reorganisations · last meaningful change 19 days ago · original builder left 1261 days ago

Rated rare mostly because: €370k per year, 101 users, alive 58x longer than intended.