"The first time I visited a data center I was about 16," says Andrew Miller, now a data center engineer at Uber. "I knew I wanted to get into data centers, but didn't know how to."

There were no data center degrees near where he lived, so he took an IT course with a networking, security and sysadmin major - while his interest in facilities saw him running increasing numbers of servers in his dorm room.

When Uber started a self-driving car project in Pittsburgh, he joined a small team working on mass deployments of servers, and learnt structured cabling, power and cooling on the job. Now at Uber Compute he's working on the Uber Metal project for standardized colocation deployments.

With rack densities going from 8kW to 50kW and even beyond, he says "that's insane". He thinks the answer will be a move away from generic processors towards more customized FPGAs and ASICs. He's also interested in the potential for micro grids to save money, and increase reliability at the same time.