Sales built a video game

“Vercel probably handles backups.”— Group Controller

Reason:

Honestly? Because the vendor quoted 16 months and a discovery phase. With 99 users and 82 feature requests.

Built by:

Lukas, an intern

Build time:

one weekend

Built with:

plain HTML and 1,900 lines of jQuery

Database:

an old laptop in the server room

Authentication:

the webhook secret is "secret"

Deployment:

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

Responsible:

Petra, who has never seen the source code

Documentation:

a Jira ticket with 40 comments

Security situation:

the API key has never been rotated

Future disaster:

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

Age: 3.1 years · originally expected to last 3 months · 3 owners so far · survived 3 reorganisations · last meaningful change 823 days ago

Rated legendary mostly because: 96% chance of becoming business critical, €25k per year, alive 12x longer than intended.