Daniel Schmidt
Frontend engineer working on the difficult parts between product, design and engineering.
I care about architecture, accessibility, performance and developer experience, and about building things that are still pleasant to work with years later.
The day job
At Charlie Tango, I help set the technical direction on larger web projects while staying hands-on as a developer.
I’ve helped shape our frontend platform and engineering practices, led frontend architecture, improved accessibility and testing, mentored developers, and built tooling that makes the work easier for the teams using it.
Built for Umbraco
Open source, for the CMS behind most of that work.
blur-placeholder
Image placeholders generated once, in Umbraco.
Generated when the image is saved and handed to the frontend as one string. Public requests do no work.
web-analytics
Vercel and Plausible reports inside the Umbraco backoffice.
Traffic, and the numbers for the page being edited, without opening another tab. It reads the analytics you already run.
@charlietango/umbraco-rich-text
Umbraco rich text, rendered as React components.
Renders the Delivery API rich text JSON as React, with a hook to swap any node or block for a component of your own.
Look insideSource
Open source
I maintain react-intersection-observer, a React library downloaded around 20 million times a month, along with a handful of other projects.
Open source is where I get to scratch the kinds of technical itches that turn up repeatedly in real projects, and occasionally discover that several million other people had the same itch.
react-intersection-observer
Tell a React component when it enters the viewport.
A hook, a render prop, and a component over the Intersection Observer API. It reuses observers where the options match, and ships a test mock so tests do not need a browser.
It’s a Unix system!
When I saw Jurassic Park back in 1996, the dinosaurs were cool. But not as cool as the “unix” file system, flown through in 3D to lock the doors. I have wanted to build one ever since.
One got out
It has been hanging over the canyon since 1978, and there are fifty-four more behind it.