A Diary of a Data Engineer

You ingest data. You model it. You transform it. You serve it. Someone asks for a change. Everything breaks. You rebuild. This is the loop. It was the loop in 2005 with SSIS and star schemas. It&rsquo;s the loop in 2025 with dbt and Iceberg, or 2026 with prompting AI agents. The tools change. The loop doesn&rsquo;t. The Invisible Plumbers When I started my career in 2003, there was no &ldquo;data…