Niek designed this BareDuino micro, that is available at github:
For some Arduino projects, you don’t actually need that many IO pins. That’s exactly the case when I tried to build a simple RGB throwie that would cycle through colours. I was looking for a cheaper alternative to the Arduino UNO’s ATmega328P when I stumbled across this post by MIT’s High-Low Tech lab. They developed a library for programming the 8-pins ATtiny45/85 from the Arduino IDE. It’s a very smart solution to use permanently in some low pin-usage projects, but you still need to hook up individual wires from your programmer to the ATtiny to be able to program it. That’s when I came up with the idea of the BareDuino Micro.
Wow,
So you can actually create a library of C code, write it in an IDE and program a blank microcontroller with a programmer and now there is a board designed to hook up directly to the programmer?
Little info, that’s how its been done long before there ever was an Arduino.