The scale of a cloud datacenter is pretty awesome to witness. I had the opportunity to visit a large cloud company’s data center years ago, it was immense in scale and (mostly) very well thought out.
I’m personally of the opinion that everyone who works in software should have to rack a server and bootstrap it. Physically mount it, cable it, and get the *nix distribution of your choice running on it, serving Hello, World.
Everywhere I’ve worked, there is a marked difference in the quality of engineers who had played with hardware - even those who merely had expressed interest in it, and maybe had an RPi - and those who had not. There is something about physically touching the thing that runs your code that makes you better at it. Maybe it’s a correlation between “wants to play with something unnecessary but adjacent” and “curious enough to ask why more frequently,” but I swear, it exists.
