Wrapping up
You made it! Again! In Part 1 of the tutorial we learned about a lot of features that make it easier to create functionality for your users—cells, forms, scaffolding, and more. In Part 2 we learned more about the features that make life easier for us, the developers: Storybook and testing.
Testing is like wearing a seat belt: 99% of the time may not see any direct benefits, but that other 1% of the time you're really glad you were wearing it. The first time your build stops and prevents some production-crashing bug from going live you'll know that all those hours you spent writing tests were worth it. Getting into the habit of writing tests along with your user-facing code is the greatest gift you can give your future developer self (that, and writing good comments!).
Will there be a Part 3 of the tutorial? It's a fact that the best things come in threes: Lord of the Rings movies, sides of a triangle, and Super Mario Bros. games on the NES. We've spent a lot of time getting our features working but not much time with optimization and polish. Premature optimization is the root of all evil, but once your site is live and you've got real users on it you'll get a sense of what could be faster, prettier or more efficient. That's when time spent optimizing can pay huge dividends. But, discovering the techniques and best practices for those optimizations...that's a whole different story. The kind of story that Redwood loves to help you write!
So until next time, a bit of wisdom to help combat that next bout of every developer's nemesis, imposter syndrome:
"There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self."
— Ernest Hemingway
What's Next#
Want to add some more features to your app? Check out some of our Cookbook recipes like calling to a third party API and deploying an app without an API at all. We've also got lots of guides for more info on Redwood's internals.
Roadmap#
Check out our Roadmap to see where we're headed and how we're going to get there. If you're interested in helping with anything you see, just let us know over on the RedwoodJS Forum and we'll be happy to get you set up.
Help Us!#
What do you think of Redwood? Is it the Next Step for JS frameworks? What can it do better? We've got a lot more planned. Want to help us build these upcoming features?
Thanks for following along. Now go out and build something amazing!