I travel from Chicago to Des Moines several times a year to visit my parents, and have seen much of what the city has to offer. Restaurants, music, culture are

I travel from Chicago to Des Moines several times a year to visit my parents, and have seen much of what the city has to offer. Restaurants, music, culture are all fantastic. The local craft beer scene is growing like crazy, and most taprooms have prime spots along popular bike trails throughout the city. I'd consider a fantastic city for biking. And between Ragbrai and the HyVee Tri every year I'm reminded of how awesome the bike scene is there. The tech scene is like many other mid-sized cities in the Midwest: small, growing, but not ever close to the major tech hubs. If you're going to bootstrap a company and want to have a low cost of living it's not a horrible place to do so. Dwolla strikes me as a bit of an anomaly in the city, as most of Des Moines is insurance companies and agribusiness (which is no joke, especially if you like embedded programming and GPS). You absolutely have to own a car, and in the past few years something resembling bad traffic has started to appear as the sprawl north and west of the city accelerates. Des Moines is basically a better alternative to the other mid-sized cities like St. Louis, Indy, Columbus, Milwaukee, etc.