An intern built a licence renewal reminder

“We have a README.”— Daniel, An intern

Reason:

Mainly because Jira is only reachable on the VPN, which drops every 12 minutes. Built in a long Thursday and demonstrated immediately afterwards.

Built by:

Daniel, a field technician

Build time:

one weekend

Built with:

Excel macros, exposed over HTTP

Database:

Teams chat history

Authentication:

the production token is in Slack

Deployment:

kept alive by a scheduled task every 8 minutes

Responsible:

IT, according to Finance

Documentation:

a Confluence page marked "draft", last edited 88 days ago

Security situation:

the tenant ID comes directly from the query string

Future disaster:

It will stop working when Nadia's credit card expires.

Age: 2.4 years · originally expected to last 3 months · 4 owners so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 210 days ago

Rated common mostly because: €381k per year, 3 accidental connections, alive 10x longer than intended.