I've been in software development since 2017. Started as a .NET developer, transitioned into SDE-III, and for the past 4 years working as data engineer. Eight years in tech means I'm not new to building things but data engineering was a different world for me. More of a sql related task but different in its own uniqueness. Like a different world in itself. I knew dbt existed. I'd seen it in job descriptions. But I had no real idea what it actually did or why companies were treating it like a big deal. My mental model was basically: "May be a new tool like most other available in market." Spoiler: I was wrong. Here's what I built and what changed my mind. The Problem I Was Trying to Solve I wanted a real data engineering project I could point to. Not a tutorial I followed on YouTube. Not a dataset from Kaggle. Something with actual data, actual decisions, and actual engineering challenges. I'm based in Pakistan and the Pakistan Stock Exchange (PSX) had no decent open data tooling.…