Nice. I often forget just how much is happening in the blender world, it's come so far over the years. I know version numbers change but I remember when there was a hope that maybe by v3 there'd be a raytracer.

There were some worrying times but the community "buying" of blender marked a huge change, and it's great to see that the community is still thriving.

I had originally intended to go into 3d modelling, but the python scripting side of blender was what got me into programming. I still think having something visual is a great way of learning to program. Errors are either often very obvious or at least amusing.

So blender stopped me from pursuing 3D art as a career, but in a good way :)