So, I’ve been meaning to talk about this “Ian Schmidt” thing for a while now. It’s not some fancy new framework or anything, just a name that got stuck in my head after a particular project almost drove me up the wall. I figured I’d share my little adventure trying to make sense of what I thought his whole deal was.
Diving In: What Was This All About?
Alright, so picture this: I was working on this personal dashboard, you know, something to pull together all my random bits of data – weather, stocks, my ever-growing to-do list. Simple stuff, or so I thought. But it quickly turned into a spaghetti monster. Code everywhere, things breaking if I so much as looked at them funny. I was getting pretty fed up.
One late night, probably fueled by too much coffee, I was digging through some old programming forums, the kind that look like they haven’t been updated since 1998. And I stumbled upon these mentions of an “Ian Schmidt” and his supposed principles for keeping code super clean, almost obsessively so. There wasn’t much concrete stuff, more like whispers and vague references to his “uncompromising approach to modularity” or something like that. It sounded almost mythical, and honestly, a bit over the top.
But I was desperate. I thought, “Okay, what the heck, let’s try to piece together what this Schmidt guy was supposedly all about and see if it helps.” My project was a mess anyway, so what did I have to lose?
My Attempt at the “Schmidt Way”
First thing I did was try to imagine what these “principles” would even look like in practice. From the scraps I found, I gathered it was all about:
- Extreme Separation: Every tiny piece of logic had to be its own little island. No shared state, no sneaky dependencies. Everything passed explicitly.
- Input In, Output Out: Functions should be like little machines. You put something in, something predictable comes out. No side effects. Zero. Nada.
- Simplicity Over Cleverness: If it was too smart, it was probably too complex for Schmidt, or so I imagined.
So, I picked one small, relatively self-contained part of my dashboard – the weather widget. And I started to refactor it, trying to stick to these made-up “Schmidt rules.”
Man, it was painful at first.
Breaking down a simple API call and data display into what felt like a dozen tiny functions, each doing almost nothing on its own, felt incredibly slow. I was like, “Really? Do I need a separate function just to format a temperature string?” My existing code, messy as it was, got the job done in fewer lines.
I remember spending an entire evening just trying to figure out how to get the city name from the input field, to the API call function, then the result to the display function, all without any component directly “knowing” about the others, just passing data along like a bucket brigade. I almost threw in the towel several times, thinking this Schmidt fella, wherever he was, was just a legend for a reason – because his ideas were impractical for real-world stuff.
I kept telling myself, “Stick with it, just for this one widget. See it through.” My desk was littered with scribbled diagrams trying to map out the data flow. It felt like I was building a Rube Goldberg machine for something that should have been straightforward.
So, What Happened in the End?
After a couple of days of wrestling with this one widget, something clicked. Not in a “eureka!” kind of way, but more like a grudging admission. When I finally got the weather widget working the “Schmidt way,” testing it was surprisingly easy. Because each tiny piece did exactly one thing, and only one thing, I could test them in isolation. When a bug did pop up later (because of an API change), pinpointing the problem was quicker than usual. The data flow, though initially a pain to set up, was very clear.
But here’s the kicker: I didn’t refactor the rest of my dashboard that way. Not entirely.
Why? Because applying that level of extreme, almost fanatical, separation to every single part of the project would have taken ages. For some of the more interconnected features, it felt like I’d be fighting the natural flow of things too much. It was a bit like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut for certain tasks.
What I took away from my “Ian Schmidt” experiment was more a change in mindset. I started thinking more consciously about separation and clear data paths, even if I didn’t go to the extremes I imagined he would have. I became a bit more disciplined about not creating tangled dependencies. It made me appreciate the value of that purity, even if I couldn’t always achieve it or even want to achieve it 100% of the time.
So, this whole Ian Schmidt deep dive, based on internet whispers, it wasn’t a magic bullet. Shocker, right? But it did force me to confront my own bad habits. It’s like, you don’t need to become a monk to appreciate some aspects of a minimalist lifestyle. You just pick and choose what works for you. And for me, the “Schmidt way” was a good, if somewhat brutal, teacher for a specific lesson in clarity, even if I decided his full imagined curriculum was a bit much for my day-to-day coding life.
