Field Service built a vendor onboarding portal

“Management asked for it.”— IT Service Desk

Reason:

Honestly? Because the CEO asked for it in a corridor on a Tuesday. Forked from a tutorial at 17:04 and never cleaned up.

Built by:

Anja, a team lead

Build time:

6 evenings

Built with:

Excel macros, exposed over HTTP

Database:

one table called data

Authentication:

nobody knows the password, but the browser still does

Deployment:

running behind nginx config copied from Stack Overflow

Responsible:

Katrin, currently on parental leave

Documentation:

a Slack thread from October

Security situation:

the admin account is also the service account

Future disaster:

It will fail exactly when Thomas is on holiday.

Age: 1.2 years · originally expected to last 2 months · 2 owners so far · last meaningful change 19 days ago · original builder left 130 days ago

Rated common mostly because: €503k per year, 4 departments depend on it, the builder has left.