Facility Services built a visitor sign-in kiosk

“It's in the backlog.”— Plant Manager

Reason:

Allegedly because Customers.xlsm finally crashed at 23:11. Renamed twice to avoid attention.

Built by:

Marco, the management assistant

Build time:

1 hours 52 minutes

Built with:

a no-code builder on a personal account

Database:

Firestore because the prototype needed to ship by Friday

Authentication:

the webhook secret is "secret"

Deployment:

running on Ubuntu 22.04 and nobody wants to upgrade it

Responsible:

an intern whose contract ended in July

Documentation:

a file called how-it-works-v2-final-final.docx

Security situation:

the audit log is console.log

Future disaster:

It will stop working after someone renames a column.

Age: 8.2 years · originally expected to last 4 weeks · 3 owners so far · survived 3 reorganisations · last meaningful change 823 days ago · original builder left 1178 days ago

Rated common mostly because: €135k per year, alive 100x longer than intended, the builder has left.