R&D built a contract deadline reminder bot

“The quarter ends Friday.”— Priya, R&D

Reason:

Mainly because the official form has 31 fields and not the one that matters. Quietly rolled out to two countries.

Built by:

Priya, a key account manager

Build time:

5 evenings

Built with:

an Electron app, for a form

Database:

a MongoDB with no password on port 27017

Authentication:

the security model is "Google probably handles that"

Deployment:

deployed into production because staging was broken

Responsible:

Marco, because their email address is in the config

Documentation:

a Notion page titled "New docs"

Security situation:

production secrets are in .env.example

Future disaster:

It will turn out to be the only system that knows the real numbers.

Age: 1.7 years · originally expected to last 2 months · 1 owner so far · last meaningful change 210 days ago

Rated common mostly because: 443 users, alive 10x longer than intended, 11% chance of becoming business critical.