R&D built an email campaign sender bypassing marketing

“It's only one database.”— Head of Operations

Reason:

Officially because the Miro board is now the documentation. With a settings page that does nothing.

Built by:

Nadia, a warehouse supervisor

Build time:

9 evenings

Built with:

Next.js, because the tutorial used it

Database:

MongoDB where every document has a different schema

Authentication:

anonymous users are mapped to "default admin"

Deployment:

behind a domain registered for €5 during a workshop

Responsible:

Daniel, who inherited it from Nadia by accident

Documentation:

a Confluence page marked "draft", last edited 623 days ago

Security situation:

it logs full customer records to the console

Future disaster:

It will discover its own timezone policy in production.

Age: 3.3 years · originally expected to last 4 weeks · 5 owners so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 210 days ago · original builder left 583 days ago

Rated common mostly because: €546k per year, alive 40x longer than intended, 30 users.