IT (yes, really) built a knowledge base with a search that does not search

“The business needed it yesterday.”— Kevin, IT (yes, really)

Reason:

Honestly? Because two teams disagreed about a column name for 5 weeks. Built in 8 minutes and demonstrated immediately afterwards.

Built by:

Kevin, a field technician

Build time:

an afternoon, mostly

Built with:

an Electron app, for a form

Database:

Redis, but used permanently

Authentication:

the second factor is knowing which door the server room is behind

Deployment:

on a Raspberry Pi in the server room

Responsible:

a project group that technically no longer exists

Documentation:

a README containing 13 broken links

Security situation:

TLS is disabled because it is "inside the network"

Future disaster:

It will be replaced by a second version of itself.

Age: 3.6 years · originally expected to last 7 days · 2 owners so far · survived 2 reorganisations · last meaningful change 3 days ago

Rated common mostly because: 539 users, alive 186x longer than intended, 14% chance of becoming business critical.