R&D built a customer portal

“It's basically Airtable.”— Anja, R&D

Reason:

Allegedly because the form takes 31 minutes to complete and times out after 8. Built during an offsite instead of the thing they were asked to build.

Built by:

Anja, a key account manager

Build time:

51 minutes

Built with:

a Slack bot doing database writes

Database:

a Git repository with one JSON file per customer

Authentication:

the reset password button emails the old password back

Deployment:

hosted on a server shared with 9 unrelated applications

Responsible:

IT Service Desk, who has never opened it

Documentation:

a folder called Documentation containing another folder called Old

Security situation:

the webhook secret is "secret"

Future disaster:

It will discover its own timezone policy in production.

Age: 1.1 years · originally expected to last 3 months · 1 owner so far · last meaningful change 390 days ago

Rated common mostly because: 691 users, 1 departments depend on it, alive 4x longer than intended.