So you’ve made your first attempt at creating a DRF API, but now you need to figure out how to put the hair on the proverbial pony. You want to make things easier on your client developers so they can get exactly what they need. I’ll walk through things that made our lives better developing a Django REST Framework API serving a React frontend. I’ll include optimizations such as embedding related fields into serializers, using different serializers for different users and use cases (HTTP methods), and using DRF’s actions decorator to provide easy access to related tasks. I’ll also touch on some third-party libraries that made life way easier, such as rest-framework-filters, django-rest-swagger, and django-simple-history.