# A World Cup-Era Police Software Project Faced Severe Staffing and Infrastructure Constraints

DevFeed: [A World Cup-Era Police Software Project Faced Severe Staffing and Infrastructure Constraints](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/tales-from-the-world-cup-28513.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://thedailywtf.com/articles/tales-from-the-world-cup>)

Author: Ellis Morning

Published: 2026-08-31T06:30:00Z

Content type: opinion

Language: en

Sources: [The Daily WTF](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/the-daily-wtf.md>)

Topics: [Software](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/software.md>), [systems](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/systems.md>), [Website](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/website.md>), [App](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/app.md>), [servers](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/servers.md>), [incident](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/incident.md>)

Tags: [app](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/app.md>), [brazil](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/brazil.md>), [bugs](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/bugs.md>), [feature-articles](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/feature-articles.md>), [hiring](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/hiring.md>), [onboarding](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/onboarding.md>), [real-time](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/real-time.md>), [server](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/server.md>), [software](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/software.md>), [systems](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/systems.md>), [website](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/website.md>)

## AI overview

An anonymous submitter recounts a rushed 2014 project in Brazil to build a police system before the World Cup. The project combined public websites, police-car location tracking, automated reporting, and real-time incident submissions, but faced severe staffing, scheduling, infrastructure, and software bug problems.

## Source excerpt

All I can say in response to our anonymous submitter's story is, ALMOST?! With the World Cup being hosted in North America this year, I remembered this story that happened back in 2014. At the time I was working in Brazil, for a company that builds software systems for public services. And, with the World Cup being hosted there, in came the opportunity for local agencies to invest in modernization, with pretty much a blank check to get new services, so long as it was deployed before the end of the World Cup. And so the sales people did what they did best, and went around trying to upsell whoever would be willing to buy -- no matter our actual capacity for developing the things. So it was that I was pulled into this new fancy digital system for the police force of a state capital. However, we had only about 4 engineers available, and what they sold was a project estimated for a team of 20, to be delivered in 3 months, with no room for delay. And it wasn't just our core C&D product, but this massive thing with customized public-facing websites, live tracking of the position of different police cars delivered to a tablet in each car, automated reporting, etc. First thing: We received a pile of 24 resumes, and were told to choose 16 of those. Maybe 3 were acceptable, but we had to waste 1 month hiring and onboarding 13 other people who were worse than useless. Classic man-month problem. We eventually had to tell management that nothing would be delivered this way, so they did the very best next thing: fly us to this other city, so we could work embedded there, in full crunch mode for the delivery. We pretty much worked 12+ hours a day, 7 days a week, for those next 2 weeks. Another situation: they wanted this system where people could take a photo of an incident in progress, and submit via this app + website, to be verified by an operator in real-time. We nicknamed it the "dick-pic encyclopedia." Even worse, we only had the budget to run a single server, so this thing re