Dog Shelter Team built a PDF-to-Excel converter

“It's only customer names.”— Kevin, Dog Shelter Team

Reason:

Allegedly because the documentation describes a button that no longer exists. With 2 users, one of whom is the CEO.

Built by:

Kevin, an analyst

Build time:

an afternoon, mostly

Built with:

Next.js, because the tutorial used it

Database:

a production table where the primary key is the customer's name

Authentication:

CSRF protection was disabled during debugging

Deployment:

behind a domain Chen owns privately

Responsible:

Miriam, who has not touched it in 7 months

Documentation:

a README describing a version that no longer exists

Security situation:

the encryption key is stored next to the encrypted data

Future disaster:

It will eventually need a migration project larger than the app itself.

Age: 184 days · originally expected to last 4 weeks · 2 owners so far · last meaningful change 184 days ago

Rated rare mostly because: 4 accidental connections, 27 users, alive 6x longer than intended.