Data Horror Stories: Spooky Talks From Beyond the Governed

Join the Data Visualization and Data Engineers D.C. Meetups for a spooky evening of tall tales of data horror stories… broken dashboards, data pipelines full of tombstone records, mysterious creatures from the data swamp….. Costumes welcome. AGENDA - 5:30 - Doors - 5:30 - 6:15: Food & Socializing - 6:15 - 6:30: Introductions - 6:30 - 7:15: Featured Tale: Alex Gurvich - 7:15 - 7:45: Tales from the Community (2-3 stories, 10-15 minutes each) - 7:45 - 8:00: Pass the Flashlight (open floor) Abstract: If you've ever stared at a dashboard at 11 p.m. and felt a cold chill run down your spine, this event is for you. Data Viz D.C. and Data Engineering D.C. are joining forces for one night only to swap the stories we usually only tell after a few drinks. Every data professional has one. It's the pipeline that silently stopped loading in March, and nobody noticed until the board meeting in June. These aren't hypotheticals made up by an AI, they're the times we personally cost our actual employers real money, or stood close enough to watch it happen (wink wink). Featured Tale. Alex opens the night with a double feature. The first is a story still unfolding: a spec-driven development vibe-coded data reduction pipeline that was supposedly working fine, and is very much not fine. He's still fighting it. The second is a cautionary tale from the cloud: an unmonitored S3 sync, an EventBridge rule doing exactly what it was told, and the moment ten thousand Step Functions woke up at once. Tales from the Community. A few brave souls take the stage for longer stories of their own: the outages, the bad deploys, the numbers that were wrong for years. Pass the Flashlight. Then we dim the lights and pass the flashlight around. Anyone who wants to share a close call, catastrophe, or slow-motion disaster gets a turn. No slides required, and no judgment allowed. The goal isn't to scare you away from production. It's to remind everyone that we've all been there, and that talking openly about failure, without blame, is how teams actually get better. Bring a story, bring a friend, and come in costume if you dare. Have a horror story worth a longer slot? A couple of spots are still open. Reach out to the organizers. Bio: Alex Gurvich is a data engineer at Excella who once studied the death of stars and now mostly studies the death of pipelines. He is the first and, as of this writing, only confirmed speaker, which is its own kind of horror story. Data Engineers And Data Visualization meetups are programs of Data Community DC. www.dc2.org