What's the dumbest thing you've shipped?

snuff@lemmy.world to Programming@programming.dev – 176 points –

18 month project is winding down. I suspect it will have 1 use in the next 4 years we are supporting it.

The tool is basically a copy of the S3 browser, only shittier. The license for the S3 browser is only 20 bucks btw.

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This was a series of decisions with good intentions that went poorly in the long run.

Our customer wanted us to setup a system so their users could track their products from their site from a variety of carriers; but their backend was very old and difficult to work with, and their network very locked down.

We were struggling to setup a single carrier, so we eventually decided to setup a new server with modern tooling on our own network so we could develop this and other “complicated” features with less pain, and they would only have to make a single exception to their firewall.

Fast forward a year and:

  • They didn’t request any more “difficult” features, so the server was serving a single API
  • One of our carrier’s API keys had expired and nobody noticed because they weren’t using it, and they didn’t request support for additional carriers either
  • Somebody on their security team noticed the strange calls to our servers and demanded we moved the API to their infrastructure anyway
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