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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

I feel for him being in his tough spot, but let's be clear on what faker.js is. I suspect many companies (like mine) use it to create "decent"-looking data for tests. But we could trivially do without it, and basically just used it because it was there. I contrast this with some other open source projects we use that we specifically contribute to (using GitHub donations) because they are central libraries to our code base.

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How often have you implemented a trivial feature and, after adding tests, debugging, doing code review, etc, you find it’s taken a nontrivial amount of time. And it’ll likely take maintenance too as you learn what you need (easier when you’ve seen it done already).

Most of these trivial things probably take nontrivial time, and if you add all of them together for all the trivial projects you use, it’s probably saved a really serious chunk of time.

The ocean is made of “trivial” drops of water, yada yada.

Likewise, the trivial or novel that you borrow for free isn’t really free when you need to use it suddenly in ways that the license doesn’t permit or it is just technically inconvenient. It is sort of like leasing vs buying, but not really a good analogy.

Let's be clear, this is the difference between your test user being called Tom Smith with email tom@smith.com and Joseph Baker with email jbaker@bigcorp.com versus being called Foo Bar and Foo Bar2 with emails foo@example.com and foo2@example.com

"Let's be clear, action developer actually took versus action developer didn't take but in my opinion isn't that different, as someone who didn't take any actions at all" is a bad hill to die on.

I think the point is that generating pretty fake data as opposed to bland fake data is a "nice to have" rather than a "must have" for 98% of companies. And by the time you get up to AirBnb and FB, etc., they have their own internal testing data and standards based on years of real-world false negatives and false positives.

It's really a content library, which is useful, but it's not in the mission-critical category where developers can get a rubber stamp budget approval from their boss. It's a great project to get your name out there as an open source developer, rather than a viable business model IMO.

That's going to be true to some extent of every library your company uses, but for every library someone writes and offers as FOSS, you don't have to spend the cycles designing, developing, and maintaining your own, nor training new hires on using it. You're fundamentally misunderstanding the value of having good quality tools developed by someone else.

And I'm not even going to _start_ on what I think of your attitude towards test tooling vs "central libraries" other than to note that if you don't consider test tools central to your development process, I think you have bigger problems.

You're completely mischaracterizing my post. My point is that if faker were anything slightly above free, we really wouldn't have used it, and our code quality wouldn't suffer from not having it. It was more of a "ooh, that's kinda nice" thing when we used it.

> And I'm not even going to _start_ on what I think of your attitude towards test tooling vs "central libraries" other than to note that if you don't consider test tools central to your development process, I think you have bigger problems.

That's not my attitude at all and is a bullshit strawman. I actually do donate to libraries that are fundamental to our test framework. Faker is just definitely not one of them.

> and our code quality wouldn't suffer from not having it

Your code quality is irrelevant. What matters is did it save you time, and what is that time worth to you and your business.

Their whole point is that it didn't actually save any time; if it didn't exist for free, they wouldn't have done it themselves.

That just goes to show you how rough the real world really is. Like, it’s free and a pretty good solution, but still replaceable lol.

Tough crowd.

Always charge, or get value somehow, because I can promise you people will feel entitled to whatever baseline you give them (in this case ‘free’).

Everyone and everything is replaceable, oh cruel world, why you do us dirty like that?

That's not how tough the world is, it's how tough people choose to make it.

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