Also, most of them are held in extremely far away resorts, so the things that interested me were always an expensive flight and an expensive hotel away. So, unless my employer was paying for it, I really couldn't go. Few things that interested me and were on my employer's docket to attend merged.
This time, I have found one that really piques my interest, is close and inexpensive to get to.
I have been dabbling with Ruby since... oh geez, sometime in the late 90's. It was simple, it was functional. In minutes, I had built the entire framework for a client-server application. A labor that had taken days in Visual Basic or C++. We would use it to prototype out numerous projects and then reimplement in C++ to get the speed.
When Ruby on Rails came around, I knew that it is something I wanted to use. Working with it finally drove in what the Model-View-Controller architecture really meant and how to use it properly. I have made a few projects in it that have seen the light of the web. The rest of the iceberg were 1 off projects that I was testing out ideas and getting used to how to do things. One such project was GoozexIndy.
Last week, during the family vacation, I started working on a small, doable, and interesting project that I hope to get some input from during the convention.
That right there is the key to why I want to go to Ruby Midwest: Peers. I hope that the inspiration, the networking, the critiquing, and the knowledge that comes from the interaction makes this a wonderful trip.
