Um, hi! I'm Andi, I'm a software engineer in the bay area, and my introduction to Lua is that in my free time I make video games! You can find a bunch of them at
http://runhello.com. Most of them are weird or silly. For a couple of years, until about the end of last year, I did all of my game work in a game engine called Polycode, which allowed me to write engine-y bits in C++ while writing all the game parts in Lua. Lua pretty quickly became just about my favorite programming language, and I used it until what I was doing no longer matched what Polycode/Lua were able to provide.
I'm now working on designing an alternate language called Emily (because it's ML-y… it's a joke) which is highly inspired by Lua and I hope will provide a couple of the things I didn't see in Lua (clean C++ integration, types). And maybe if at some point it actually works I'll just wind up trying to roll the features into a Lua VM ^_^