welcome
Thank you for purchasing the MEAP edition of Data Engineering with AI in a Month of Lunches. Writing this book has been one of the most rewarding challenges of my career. AI and LLMs are moving fast, but that only proves how urgent it is to understand how to use them with purpose, not just curiosity.
This book was born from a simple frustration. Data work has become too complex. Somewhere along the way, we let tooling, infrastructure, and admin tasks take over the job. Data engineers are now expected to spend more time figuring out platform permissions and YAML configurations than actually working with data. We have overindexed on tools and lost the plot.
This book is my attempt to bring it back.
You’ll learn how to work directly with AI, how to build smarter workflows, and how to use LLMs in a programmatic, repeatable way. We’ll keep things practical. You’ll write SQL and Python, you’ll hit real APIs, and you’ll work through labs that are grounded in the kinds of problems data engineers deal with every week.