Hey everyone and happy belated new year. 
I haven't seen anything like this posted here before, so hopefully it's allowed. Starting this year, I am no longer working as a full time software engineer, as I am now trying to work full time on my Ogre based project! I've been working on developing a game for a long time (over 6 years as of now), and it's been a long and winding road, but I've loved (mostly) every moment of it. My plan was to start creating devlogs on Youtube of the games I would be developing, so please take a look at my first video:
I am using my own custom engine called the avEngine for which I am using Ogre-next 2.3 for graphics. This video describes my entire journey to where I am today as well as my experience with Ogre.
I originally started this project to build a single game that I had an idea for, however as time moved on I ended up mostly with just a fairly capable engine to provide all the things I needed. I decided it was best to write small, simpler games with my engine in the early days to test it and improve my skills. As a result of this I don't have any finished games to show you, but I hope to change that in the coming years 
My plan is to document the development of these smaller games on YouTube as I go, so please feel free to subscribe.
I'd like to emphasise what a joy it has been using Ogre and how great I think the community is. I had to cut lots from that video (it was getting way too long) so I think I ended up emphasising what a grind it was, but I mean that in the best way! I grew massively as a programmer and software engineer from my experience with Ogre, and I do believe that sometimes taking the more difficult route is the best option. My work on open source was what helped land me actual employment, so it's definitely worth doing! Starting from basically no knowledge of 3D, it was challenging getting things up and running, but honestly if I had to start from the beginning, I would do pretty much everything the same.
Special thanks goes to the Ogre devs, who are the real heroes of this community. I'm sure if there's a heaven you'll be going there
Thanks as well to:
Bullet Physics
Squirrel programming language
ColibriGUI
OpenAL-soft
RecastDetour
SDL2