The Management Assistant built an expense approval workflow

“IT would have taken months.”— Group Controller

Reason:

Officially because IT said no, politely, in writing, on a Thursday. Already exported 73,703 rows to somebody's laptop.

Built by:

Thomas, a recruiter

Build time:

a long Thursday

Built with:

an Electron app, for a form

Database:

Supabase on a free tier that pauses in 20 days

Authentication:

an API key in the frontend bundle

Deployment:

deployed 52 minutes before the builder went on holiday

Responsible:

Thomas, who inherited it from Thomas by accident

Documentation:

none whatsoever

Security situation:

it logs full customer records to the console

Future disaster:

It will be replaced by a second version of itself.

Age: 21 days · originally expected to last 3 weeks · 1 owner so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 3 days ago · original builder left 41 days ago

Rated common mostly because: 68% chance of becoming business critical, 30 users, 2 departments depend on it.