Hi,
My name is Daniel, I am a Ruby on Rails and Ember web developer. I have been working with web applications since I was doing my bachelor degree. At that time I was implementing platforms to support education because I was part of a research group at my University.
For more than three years, I have been working as a freelancer using mostly Ruby on Rails and Ember. At the beginning, I was involved with several projects, most of them related with platforms to support the agriculture and grocery industries.
I care deeply about education, so I am constantly picking projects that align with this passion. Nowadays I work on an online education platform that supports people in using design thinking to further their work.
My attempt to become a good "Embereño"
I started to work with Ember 3 years ago. It was very hard for me at the beginning, so, I was just asking about Ember basics to a friend of mine who wrote a book called Ember 101 (https://github.com/abuiles/ember-101), He was the one who gave me the opportunity to start to work in a project with Ember.
Too often, off the shelf frameworks are customized poorly to implement what is needed. While I was learning more and more about Ember, I realized how helpful it was in very quickly building custom platforms that promote good user experiences. This encouraged me to get even more interested in Ember and its benefits.
When I started to feel more comfortable with my Ember knowledge, I made some humble contributions to the community by opening PRs to improve addons I considered useful for my projects. It was very encouraging when some of my PRs were accepted.
Some time ago, I wrote an addon for my own needs and thanks to the support of a friend, I published it. It is called ember-place-autocomplete.
Nowadays I am trying to improve my testing skills, which is the main area I want to improve. I am consistently on the Ember community Slack "testing" channel trying to learn more and contribute when I can.
I live in Colombia and the travel and accommodations are going to be very expensive in the case where I can make it to the conference. It would be ideal to receive a scholarship to be able to use that money for accommodation and travel expenses.
This is your freeform opportunity to tell us about your skills, needs, or anything else that should make you stand out as a person we should award a Scholarship ticket to. This may well be the most important question in this application.
I am very committed to improve my skills as Ember developer and I have been trying to achieve it through contributions to the community, even with small PRs like this one: ember-cli/ember-try#78.
Conferences are great learning experiences. Even though there are 2 or 3 great Ember developers in my city, there is not a big community of "Embereños" locally. This makes more complicated to be on top of what is happening in the community. Tools like Slack help, but going to a conference like EmberConf is a great opportunity to learn from people I admire, put a face in some Slack nicknames and make some friends.
I think going to the conference will help me a lot to improve my skills as developer and be able to contribute to the community in a better way.
For the last part:
I was about to go to EmberConf 2016, but I was not able to go due some financial problems I had a month after I bought my ticket to the conference, so, I have to request a refund and ask to a friend to bring me the t-shirt of the conference. When he arrived to Medellín and gave the t-shirt, he told me a lot of good experiences about the conference. It feel a bit sad because I wanted to be there and live that experience by myself.
So, encorage my self to be here in 2017 and have the opportunity to experience by myself those nice experience my friend share with me. It would be nice if you help me to achieve it.