CEO's Daughter built a second CRM

“We have a backup somewhere.”— Jens, CEO's Daughter

Reason:

Allegedly because the workshop produced a Miro board with 50 sticky notes. With 2 users, one of whom is the CEO.

Built by:

Jens, a key account manager

Build time:

2 hours 12 minutes

Built with:

plain HTML and 1,900 lines of jQuery

Database:

a GitHub Gist that became business critical

Authentication:

the password is the company name backwards

Deployment:

running on an EC2 instance somebody resized manually

Responsible:

Finance Business Partner, because their name appeared first in the meeting notes

Documentation:

a PDF containing screenshots of the old UI

Security situation:

backups use the same password as production

Future disaster:

It will discover its own timezone policy in production.

Age: 2.7 years · originally expected to last 4 weeks · 2 owners so far · survived 3 reorganisations · last meaningful change 210 days ago

Rated common mostly because: 3 accidental connections, 69 users, €81k per year.