Business Intelligence built a meme outbid.lol clone

“It's only employee data.”— Managing Director

Reason:

Allegedly because the workflow has 71 steps and nobody wants to open it. With 488 users and 76 feature requests.

Built by:

Kevin, an analyst

Build time:

an afternoon, mostly

Built with:

a Slack bot doing database writes

Database:

a REST API backed by another REST API backed by Excel

Authentication:

the API key has existed since the prototype

Deployment:

behind a CDN for an app only used inside one building

Responsible:

whoever happens to be on call

Documentation:

a file called README-NEW-FINAL.md

Security situation:

the threat model is "why would anyone attack us?"

Future disaster:

It will be migrated into SAP and then quietly migrated back.

Age: 5.8 years · originally expected to last 14 days · 6 owners so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 3 days ago

Rated common mostly because: €268k per year, alive 152x longer than intended, 3 departments depend on it.