I'm one step ahed of him. Or... half a step? The application runs on a VM. Admittedly, not in the production environment. Without having an entry as a "service" in the company I won't get that. Without a security audit and concept I won't get that, and without being on a production machine I won't pass said audit. The ITSec guy I'm working with is trying his best. Yes, genuine support, knowledgable concering the company rules and... how to.. ehm... yeah, circumvent some to make progress. I get the need to look at those things, and I also want to avoid this thing spinning out of hand and being all important all of a sudden, and all that without thinking about certain important things. At the moment it feels stupid, though. My ITSec-guy agrees, which makes the whole thing actually fun to work on. We are taking this (and our work on it) serious, but not overly so. Icon: how I feel about it... (a bit)

Man, auditing those apps sounds like an easy job.

"does it run in the production environment?"

"currently not, it first needs to pass this aud..."

"sorry that's unacceptable, audit failed"

I have no problems with the concept here, but i feel like validating in a twin test/acceptance environment should allow you to pass the audit, especially for new apps.

I wrote a tool for a utility that showed where outages were. It started off as something that ran on my desktop PC (only managers had laptops) but if I real work that needed all resources then I'd shut it down. Control room people would then ring up and want it started up if bad weather was coming. The manager eventually purloined a spare PC and the software ran happily in the control room.

Until it didn't. The software was hardcoded with my username to access a database and after I left the business and a year passed they finally cleaned up the database users. That killed the software.

It was only CxO discussions that got "my" account rehydrated while a fix was prepared, after IT swore black and blue that it wasn't possible to reactivate an account. Apparently the software was now deemed so important it was then ported to a redundant VM host with hot restart and all the fruit. The skunkworks project that ran in the background sure grew up!

Fortunately all this software is now well retired and real software to do the job is making the maps.

On a lighter note, years ago I wrote an app to fill in deadbeat timesheets (100% allocated to the same job in the same location) and 6 months after I left I got a call asking why I was still submitting them. Ooopppps!

The more important question here: did they continue to pay you for all those hours you "worked"?

I know of one ftse100 company whose CI/CD pipeline will fall over spectacularly if a particular employee ever leaves.

I worked somewhere where the hosted Git repo went down for days because it automatically charged someone's credit card which was fine until he left...

We have a main card that is used for most payments to suppliers. It expired in January. By the end of the year we will have found everything that needed updating with the new card details...

I know of a large silicon valley company where one engineer behind a spectacularly successful project became a real golden boy, VP, and had a lot of freedom in how he ran his team. Fed up with the commute he decided that it would be nicer to be in central San Francisco, but couldn't persuade facilities to provide space. His solution was just to unofficially rent some space on his company AmEx card. No-one seemed to notice until a few years later when the golden shine had worn off and he had quit. The accounting department were puzzled to get a large demand for back rent from a landlord for a property they knew nothing about. Said ex-golden boy hadn't bothered to cancel the building rental, but his AmEx card had been cancelled. Eventually the landlord noticed that he wasn't getting any money.

I guess it should now be called a Lapstop after that...

> "I had never transferred it to a production server. For years, it had been quietly running on my laptop, happily doing its job."

Sounds like he had a 5 year old work computer to continue working with. Yuck. That, or he made the app on day 200 of working for the employer, and ran it for .... years. 4+ years old computer?

I dunno about you, but when I swap computers I start from scratch. Maybe copy some (editor) configuration files across. Something like a service would have never made it.

Not something I would want to have running on my laptop, especially if it is my development laptop. I am really surprised this issue didn't raise its head earlier. It suggests the laptop wasn't just left at work, but was also left running 24/7.

That part surprises me to. I mean, if you leave it always plugged in at one place for several years why would you get a laptop? A workstation would be a much better deal.