Data Engineering Weekly Notes
Mar 2 – Mar 8 · 2026-W10
1 event this week
🏛️ Quiet compliance week Compliance
📉 Oil crisis week 2 Markets
⚡ Workflow engineering week Data Engineering
🧠 Feynman Takeaway
The 'everyone's a workflow engineer' narrative emerged — orchestration becomes the universal data layer.
Everyone's a Workflow Engineer Now
In plain English
Kestra (an orchestration platform) published '2026 Data Engineering Trends: Everyone's a Workflow Engineer Now.' The thesis: as AI handles more low-level coding, data engineers shift from writing ETL scripts to orchestrating workflows — designing the 'when' and 'why' of data movement rather than the 'how.'
Analogy
Imagine a chef who used to chop every vegetable by hand. Now she has a robotic knife (AI) that does the chopping. Her job shifts from chopping to deciding what to cook and when to serve it. That's the data engineer of 2026: orchestrator, not coder.
Why it matters
This was the first clear articulation of the 'data engineer as orchestration designer' trend. By July, AI agents would be creating 80%+ of new databases on Databricks, making this prediction look prescient.