Summary & Recap

Congratulations! 🎉

If you have come this far, that means you probably went through the entire 🐷 Quick and Dirty guide.

You have learned to set up a complete Express application from scratch and deploy it to Heroku and MongoDB Atlas.

The tutorial went through the basics of routing and what requests from the browser or HTML forms look like.

Then, it went over the second part of the request-response cycle, and we looked into response types. Particularly, we covered responding with HTML templates (in EJS).

In the third big part, we looked at setting up a database with MongoDB and how to work with collections, creating/reading/updating/deleting records.

Lastly, we deployed the entire thing to Heroku and MongoDB Atlas. So now you have a complete application up and running.

Clean Up

If you have been following the exercises in each lesson, you may have done this already. But it’s an important part of every project to clean things up. It’s one thing to build an application that somehow works. It’s another thing to build an excellent application that’s clean and well done. And often, people underestimate the work needed to polish an application. Yet, that polish is the kind of skill you’ll need in the real world.

Before you go deeper on some topics, I recommend spending some time polishing your project. Clean up old code, and remove things that aren’t needed anymore. Try to build an application that feels mostly complete and could be used with real users.

For example, throughout the tutorial, we created a few static pages, which we later replaced with HTML templates. We also wrote some general routes responding with plain text that we later replaced with HTML templates.

We also created some routes only accessible to admins and not the general public. You already know everything you need to protect those pages from public access, requiring a secret key as a query string.

Those are just some of the ideas on how to clean up your project.

What’s Next?

Next, you can move on to some upcoming tutorials. They are currently a work in progress. But once they are done, you’ll be able to learn about organizing your code files and authenticating requests. So stay tuned!