Guide to data tools landscape for developers

A few suggestions:

- Add a "last updated" note, since this space changes often (see the prefect/dagster situation that just happened)

- Add a note about MCPs and other LLM-driven tools and features are becoming more and more important (e.g. hex.ai or the various MCPs shipped with some of the tools you mention, such as OpenMetadata)

- Maybe organize the various tools you mention briefly by their license/model (lots of them can be self hosted, some are SaaS only), since a fully self-hosted data platform is (at least for now...) very much feasible

I also wish more people would talk more about the "engineering" part of "data engineering". I've seen way too many people who claim a title like "data engineer" but lack the fundamentals of building software and are really just copy-paste scripts together.

What I'd love more DEs to think about are things like {unit,integration,e2e,performance} tests, deployments, infrastructure, networking, monitoring (you do touch on that), and all the other things a regular SWE is expected to have at least basic competency in at a certain level. For instance, tools like dbt natively support tests, but people need to write them. Or how you don't have to click-ops Airbyte, there's a terraform provider etc.

Someone reading the blog the first time might well be willing to read through the large amount of text.

But returning to it at a later date ? A quick reference TL;DR table would not go amiss IMHO.