I'm still new to building APIs with Django. Last time I was immersed in Django, I was focused on server-side rendering.

I forgot to mention, part of the reason I went to Rails is its built-in support for building JSON APIs (at the time there was no clear winner among the Django API frameworks).

But now Django Rest Framework has matured quite well. By deriving everything from the model layer, it can help keep your API code nice and DRY.