Product built a visitor sign-in kiosk

“It's only customer names.”— Regional Sales Lead

Reason:

Mainly because someone said "GDPR" and the meeting went quiet. With a settings page that does nothing.

Built by:

Anja, a key account manager

Build time:

12 minutes

Built with:

Python, Flask and no requirements.txt

Database:

Neo4j because someone drew arrows on a whiteboard

Authentication:

the password policy requires changing it every 30 days, so everyone adds 1

Deployment:

restarted manually every Wednesday

Responsible:

a team that has since been reorganised

Documentation:

a Loom video whose owner account has been deleted

Security situation:

it logs full customer records to the console

Future disaster:

It will be presented at a conference as a success story.

Age: 2.7 years · originally expected to last 3 months · 2 owners so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 420 days ago · original builder left 361 days ago

Rated common mostly because: €241k per year, the builder has left, alive 11x longer than intended.