Sustainability built a secret Santa allocator

“We barely store passwords.”— Elena, Sustainability

Reason:

Officially because the form contains 70 fields and 6 of them are called "Other". Already exported 91,414 rows to somebody's laptop.

Built by:

Elena, a controller

Build time:

51 minutes

Built with:

Airtable plus four Zapier zaps and one mystery webhook

Database:

a nightly CSV export emailed to Petra

Authentication:

the security contact is whoever notices first

Deployment:

on the marketing website's server, somehow

Responsible:

a Teams channel with 5 active members

Documentation:

a Loom video nobody can find

Security situation:

the API key is called PUBLIC_API_KEY

Future disaster:

It will discover its own timezone policy in production.

Age: 3.8 years · originally expected to last 3 weeks · 6 owners so far · survived 2 reorganisations · last meaningful change 19 days ago

Rated common mostly because: 508 users, alive 67x longer than intended, 10% chance of becoming business critical.