Great machine learning starts with resourceful feature engineering

I recently read an article in which the winner of a Kaggle Competition was not shy about sharing his technique for winning not one, but several of the analytical competitions. "I always use Gradient Boosting," he said. And then added, "but the key is Feature Engineering." A couple days later, a friend who read the same article called and asked, "What is this Feature Engineering that he's talking about?" It was a timely question, as I was in the process of developing a risk model for a client, and specifically, I was working through the stage of Feature Engineering.