Customer Support built a vendor onboarding portal

“The admin page isn't linked anywhere.”— Plant Manager

Reason:

Because the tiny change needs approval from 8 people. Quietly rolled out to three countries.

Built by:

Sarah, a warehouse supervisor

Build time:

5 evenings

Built with:

React, Vite and enthusiasm

Database:

a Postgres replica that accidentally became primary

Authentication:

there is one account called "user"

Deployment:

on a free tier that expires in 26 days

Responsible:

a Teams channel with 7 active members

Documentation:

a Slack message saying "I'll document this later"

Security situation:

CORS is set to * because it fixed the issue

Future disaster:

It will be the only application that still works during the migration.

Age: 3.7 years · originally expected to last 3 weeks · 1 owner so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 420 days ago

Rated common mostly because: 83% chance of becoming business critical, alive 65x longer than intended, 1 accidental connections.