Thanks Pieter for following up. I'm humbled by your words. Your reply made my day.
Although I've never got the pleasure of meeting you in person, your open-source work (and yes, the zeromq User Guide too!) has made an big impact on me and I want to say thank you for what you've done.
I'm really happy to hear that this project brought you out of a bad place. I think it did that for me too (after AMQP).