Legal built a demo environment that became production

“We have a diagram.”— Nadia, Legal

Reason:

Because the official form has 60 fields and not the one that matters. Built during an offsite instead of the thing they were asked to build.

Built by:

Nadia, a team lead

Build time:

4 hours 9 minutes

Built with:

Airtable plus four Zapier zaps

Database:

the production database, directly, with write access

Authentication:

the password is stored in a spreadsheet called passwords.xlsx

Deployment:

deployed to staging, which customers are now using

Responsible:

nobody officially, Bastian emotionally

Documentation:

a Jira ticket with 53 comments

Security situation:

all users technically have admin permissions

Future disaster:

It will become the source of truth in 15 months.

Age: 8.5 years · originally expected to last 3 months · 1 owner so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 823 days ago · original builder left 2047 days ago

Rated rare mostly because: direct production access, alive 34x longer than intended, nobody owns it.