same here! I got into Scratch at the age of 7 and without it (and the Scratch community), I wouldn’t have any career (or even a plan for one). I also worked as an intern on the Scratch team at the Scratch Foundation.

I also know that one of the important developers for the Asahi Linux drivers also started on Scratch. I think there’s a lot of real software engineers who started on Scratch (and the Scratch community, which is often overlooked)