Sample data is usually dreadful
I often find myself wanting to mock-up data for something or other, like a CRM demo or some screenshots of some app or other than doesn’t have actual real-life data in there. And me being me, didn’t just want some random names being generated, I wanted an actual thing that could be true with real structure behind it while still keeping a bit of my dry humour as well.
Turpinverse reframes the Dick Turpin legend as a tongue-in-cheek business universe. Canonical characters, organisations, timeline events, and alias maps, grounded in the historical record where that exists, and clearly marked as fiction where it does not.
What shipped
- A canon dataset: fifteen-plus personas, eight-plus organisations, timeline events, alias maps.
- A Hugo site at turpinverse.uk for the universe docs.
- A Blazor Server app that exports contacts, accounts, deals, and cases as CSV, with the cross-references left intact.
It’s still very much a work in progress for me this, but the export API does work but would need some work no doubt to get into a format for actual use.
Stack
.NET 10, Aspire, Hugo, a bit of Tailwind on the Blazor side, CsvHelper for the files. Tests include canon validation so the dataset cannot quietly disagree with itself.
Repository
👉 github.com/markheydon/turpinverse
Final thoughts
It is not finished in the way a product with a version number is finished. It is far enough along to be useful, and far more interesting to click through than yet another Contoso. Certainly one that I will get round to enhancing at some point, but for now it is a fun little project that I hope others will find useful too.