At Grafieks, we’re constantly experimenting, iterating, and shipping fast. Whether it’s a new chart type, a fresh dashboard layout, or a performance tweak, one thing remains consistent across all of it: the need for realistic, structured test data.
But getting that kind of data — at the right time, in the right shape — turned out to be a bigger problem than expected. So I built my own dummy data generator. Here’s why.
The Real Problem: Test Data Is an Afterthought
As developers and designers, we often underestimate how essential realistic data is to the product development lifecycle. Especially in a data-heavy environment like Grafieks, mock data isn’t just filler — it’s how we:
- Validate new visualizations
- Stress-test layouts with edge cases
- Ensure filters, sorting, and search behave correctly
- Demo features to stakeholders with confidence
Yet despite all that, generating good dummy data is still… clunky.
Why Existing Options Didn’t Cut It
I’ve spent my fair share of time on Kaggle and open data portals. While they’re great for exploration and ML projects, they’re rarely tailored to the structure or size we need. More often than not:
- The datasets don’t match our schema
- They lack the variability we want to test
- They require time-consuming preprocessing
Manual data entry? That’s even worse. It’s error-prone, repetitive, and scales terribly.
We Needed a Better Way
I wanted a tool that could:
- Generate data that mirrored our actual schemas
- Be reused across components, projects, and teams
- Allow quick iterations without touching a database
- Be friendly enough for non-dev teammates to use
In short, I needed a customizable, fast, no-fuss dummy data generator — something flexible enough to support generating 10000 rows.
Why I Decided to Build It Myself
After trying (and being underwhelmed by) a few existing tools, I decided to build my own. Not from scratch — I used v0 by Vercel to speed things up. It gave me a great low-code starting point for building the UI and exporting datasets, while still letting me drop into the code whenever I needed full control.
And now? We’ve got an internal tool that:
- Lets you select an industry and department to auto-generate relevant fields and data types
- Generates realistic CSV, JSON, TSV, and SQL datasets on demand
- Is already integrated into our prototyping workflow
It’s been a quiet productivity boost for the whole team.
Final Thoughts
Having the right data at the right time shouldn’t slow you down. Whether you’re designing dashboards, testing filters, or demoing features, generating structured, realistic data should be effortless. That’s exactly why I built this tool — to make dummy data one less thing to worry about.
You can export the generated data as a CSV and load it directly into Grafieks to unlock AI-powered insight generation — perfect for quick prototyping, testing hypotheses, or just exploring patterns fast.
Ready to give it a try? Head over to dummydata.grafieks.com and start generating smarter data, instantly.
