CEO Office built a customer health score with a formula in a comment

“The code is self-documenting.”— Tobias, CEO Office

Reason:

Honestly? Because the fax machine is still somehow involved. With a logo generated at 11:10.

Built by:

Tobias, someone from Procurement

Build time:

4 hours 20 minutes

Built with:

a Rails app from 2016 nobody updated

Database:

GitHub Issues. Yes, production data.

Authentication:

the user ID is a query parameter

Deployment:

running with 80% memory usage and "seems fine"

Responsible:

a shared mailbox nobody reads

Documentation:

a Notion page with one sentence and 16 empty headings

Security situation:

passwords are stored in a spreadsheet for emergencies

Future disaster:

It will get monitoring after the first outage.

Age: 1.2 years · originally expected to last 3 weeks · 1 owner so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 438 days ago · original builder left 152 days ago

Rated common mostly because: 2 accidental connections, nobody owns it, alive 21x longer than intended.