Dog Shelter Team built an onboarding checklist tool

“The password changes every year.”— Lukas, Dog Shelter Team

Reason:

Because the vendor said it could be ready in Q4, assuming requirements do not change. With a settings page that does nothing.

Built by:

Lukas, a warehouse supervisor

Build time:

an afternoon, mostly

Built with:

Excel macros, exposed over HTTP

Database:

booleans stored as "yes", "no", "Y", "N" and occasionally "maybe"

Authentication:

every employee is an admin because support tickets were taking too long

Deployment:

deployed Friday at 09:36

Responsible:

Lukas, currently on parental leave

Documentation:

a README describing a version that no longer exists

Security situation:

the temporary firewall rule is 3 months old

Future disaster:

It will hold the only copy of Suppliers_use-this-one.csv.

Age: 6.0 years · originally expected to last 14 days · 6 owners so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 3 days ago · original builder left 1887 days ago

Rated legendary mostly because: 5 accidental connections, 46% chance of becoming business critical, alive 157x longer than intended.