Dog Shelter Team built an email campaign sender bypassing marketing

“We have a backup somewhere.”— Marketing Manager

Reason:

Allegedly because the meeting to fix it created 3 more meetings. Forked from a tutorial at 16:56 and never cleaned up.

Built by:

Tobias, a product owner

Build time:

an afternoon, mostly

Built with:

a no-code builder on a personal account

Database:

a YAML file with 101,695 customer records

Authentication:

the password was last changed 88 days ago

Deployment:

behind a domain Chen owns privately

Responsible:

Ravi, because their credit card pays for it

Documentation:

a Slack message saying "I'll document this later"

Security situation:

the temporary firewall rule is 6 months old

Future disaster:

It will be migrated into the official system in 2033.

Age: 2.7 years · originally expected to last 7 days · 6 owners so far · survived 3 reorganisations · last meaningful change 74 days ago

Rated rare mostly because: €1.1m per year, 153 users, alive 139x longer than intended.