Business Process Management built a company playlist voting app

“Nobody knows the URL.”— Managing Director

Reason:

Officially because two teams disagreed about a column name for 11 weeks. Already exported 83,480 rows to somebody's laptop.

Built by:

Kevin, an analyst

Build time:

27 minutes

Built with:

Svelte, because apparently this was the moment to experiment

Database:

a Postgres database called temp containing 3 years of production data

Authentication:

the production token is in someone's shell history

Deployment:

sharing a reverse proxy with the company Christmas raffle

Responsible:

a project group that technically no longer exists

Documentation:

a Word document with tracked changes still enabled

Security situation:

MFA exists for the admin account, which everybody shares

Future disaster:

It will silently stop syncing and nobody will notice for 4 months.

Age: 2.6 years · originally expected to last 3 months · 6 owners so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 3 days ago

Rated legendary mostly because: 99% chance of becoming business critical, alive 11x longer than intended, 5 users.