Humbled by the Unofficial Excel-Based Microservice Architecture
Description
A screenshot of a social media post from the platform Bluesky, presented in a dark mode interface. The post is by a user named 'Oregon' (@oregonthedm.bsky.social). The main text of the post reads: 'Modern Programmers do be getting humbled by the little old lady in accounting who has custom crafted 70 excel sheets that all cross communicate and update each other.' Below the text, the post shows a timestamp of 'June 12, 2025 at 10:39 AM' and engagement metrics of 5 reposts, 1 quote, and 44 likes. The meme resonates with developers who have encountered surprisingly complex, mission-critical systems built by non-programmers using tools like Excel. These 'shadow IT' systems, while often fragile and undocumented, represent a form of powerful, user-driven automation that can rival bespoke software in complexity, humbling engineers who might underestimate the ingenuity of their business counterparts
Comments
15Comment deleted
We build resilient, scalable systems with 99.99% uptime, but the entire company's financials are one circular reference away from oblivion in 'Copy of Final_final_v3_USE_THIS_ONE.xlsm'
Her 12-megabyte cocktail of VLOOKUPs and circular references has stricter SLAs than your whole Kubernetes cluster
That moment when you realize the accounting department's 70-sheet Excel monstrosity with circular references, VBA macros, and hidden pivot tables has better uptime than your microservices architecture - and Karen from accounting can debug it faster than you can trace a distributed transaction
That accounting spreadsheet is basically a distributed system with eventual consistency, circular reference resolution as the consensus algorithm, and VLOOKUP as the query language - except it has better uptime than your microservices and she's the only one who understands the 'documentation' (which is color-coded cells and cryptic comments from 2003)
Her Excel empire: VLOOKUP microservices with circular refs for that sweet eventual inconsistency
It’s a fully distributed system: service discovery is the shared drive, RPC is VLOOKUP, and F9 is the consensus algorithm - somehow still more reliable than our microservices
Her 70‑sheet fabric nails CAP: consistency after she hits F9, availability until Outlook crashes, and partition tolerance courtesy of the shared drive - a service mesh with a bus factor of one
💝 Comment deleted
Been there a couple times lol Comment deleted
But can she launch doom in excel? Comment deleted
Yes. Because bureaucracy is - considered by many - instance of doom Comment deleted
Facts Comment deleted
If she puts her mind to it, yes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2qU7t6Jmfw Comment deleted
No way Comment deleted
In my former company (a VR and esports center), we routinely created franchise packages for investors. Each required a full business plan: CAPEX, OPEX, revenue projections, and ROI calculations. Most teams would draft this manually—painstaking, inconsistent, error-prone. I built a Google Sheets workbook that automated the entire pipeline: - Parametrized service catalog with operator count, wages, pricing, and environment-based demand multipliers (e.g. mall vs roadside) - Location-sensitive revenue models using scenario matrices - Inflation-adjusted cost outputs using a multiper that acts on all prices - at the end my sheet could export data as CSV to be used in illustrator. Then I made a data import script in Illustrator (via JavaScript) to auto-generate styled A4 PDFs—presentation-ready with zero design time. 2 days of work collapsed into 2 hours, with consistent outputs across all branches and reduced human error. It wasn’t glamorous code—but it was scalable tooling, and it worked. Sometimes you don't need a full-stack app or a cloud deployment. Just well-structured sheets. Comment deleted