Tired of creating test data by hand, we've built an open source data generator

Hey HN! We're Synth - a bunch of engineers out of Europe building tooling for developers. We're very excited about what we're working on and wanted to share it with the community.

We've been quite frustrated with the status quo of test data generation - after speaking to tons of other devs we've realised that many people are struggling when it comes to generating realistic looking test data.

Also, where people don’t want to copy sensitive production data to testing environments, data obfuscation can be a huge time-sink.

Enter Synth: a declarative data generator (see our website: https://getsynth.com/, github: https://github.com/getsynth/synth)

Synth enables devs and dev teams to have their application data models as code (basically a hierarchy of files) in their repos. These files can then be used to generate data for a local dev environment, automated testing in CI or even for sharing across organisations. The parameters of generation can also be tweaked to push the data model to its limits for QA, and even scaled for load testing / performance testing.

We're now working on taking the next step, and building a DSL around Synth. The Synth DSL will enable users to concisely define what data should look like and get going.

We're open source and written 100% in Rust. We believe that by making test data be as easy as using production data, we can improve the security and privacy for all of us. We'd love to get more early users as the initial feedback is positive but limited.

Thank you and looking forward to any feedback / ideas about how we can build a better tool for you!

P.S. Synth launched on HN a while back (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24198114) as an ML solution to create realistic (and safe) copies of your sensitive production data as a service. This approach quickly hit several limitations which couldn't address the use-cases we are trying to solve, happy to go into more details on this if anyone is interested.

Love this tool - use it to populate a bunch of "real-looking" data to test CDC functionality for Mongo.

Pretty quick too - generated 100,000 records in <3 sec.