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Comment by sph | Hacker News Reader

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Sure, it's a lot of fanfare, but at my job we've found working with MSW + OpenAPI to be near miraculous. I work on a web frontend and do most of my development against a mock API powered by MSW. This live preview runs against the mock API running fully in-browser.

https://oxide-console-preview.vercel.app

More details:

https://github.com/oxidecomputer/oxide.ts

https://github.com/oxidecomputer/console

https://oxide.computer/podcasts/oxide-and-friends/1426644

> a library to make Javascript testing a little bit easier

Depending on the environment you're working in, it makes testing a lot easier. MSW isn't for everyone, but it can make things a lot more painless.

I don't think they have VC money. I think the people building it just know what they're doing. Do you see anything that indicates this is a VC-funded project? It looks to me like they're only getting a little bit of money from Github Sponsors (https://github.com/sponsors/mswjs).

That's a lot of time and effort, for people earning next to nothing, for an open-source library. I'm not saying it's bad they have a beautiful website to rival any small SaaS, but how is even possible they have the time and energy to spend on that, rather than on the code itself? What would Linux or GNOME or leftpad look like with a proportional amount of marketing effort?

Last time I checked, testing libraries did not have custom iconset and a testimonial section to rival the Stripe homepage.

I think this is actually pretty common in the JavaScript ecosystem. Presumably, because contributors are very skilled in building websites and maybe also because users have higher expectations when it comes to presentation. I mean checkout https://vitest.dev/ https://jestjs.io/ https://webdriver.io/de/ https://playwright.dev/ (all testing related stuff).

I agree. Beautiful documentation helped me a lot early on when getting into the JS ecosystem.

A few things:

1. It's actually pretty easy to get a pretty site these days. The SaaS layout is so standardized you can just buy a template to get your React site up and running and looking professional for a couple hundred dollars and a few hours of work. The site overall definitely took more time than that.

2. This is a library for front-end developers. It's made by front-end developers who probably have some design skills of their own. That makes it easier for them than Linux's kernel hacker team to set up a nice website.

3. Is this just a matter of insecurity on your part? I'm sure you have plenty of dev skills but maybe they don't extend to UI and you don't like that this team can throw together a beautiful site for something that's merely a side-project?

I don’t understand, your complaint is that the project is too well done?

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