Data engineering emerged when the ☁️ and big data made data interaction far more complex, scaled, and dynamic compared with the good old days of running against a walled-garden database in the data center. The cloud broke down all the traditional barriers that constrained data interactions in the data center. This made things even more complex to manage. 🤯 Somewhere along the lines, data engineering emerged. ✨ What exactly is a data engineer? 🧐 Joe Reis and Matthew Housley - authors of the bestseller Fundamentals of Data Engineering - leaped into the void of defining the profession and shared a few thoughts in this interview.