How to make a developer portfolio with Django REST and React

Part 1: Creating the Django REST API

Why am I redoing my portfolio?

My current portfolio, kristianroopnarine.com , is just a basic website made with HTML and Bootstrap. I made that website a couple of months ago to showcase some of my data analysis projects and scripts I made using Python. However, since then I’ve learned a lot more than my portfolio is showing. Just to summarize the progress I’ve made:

1. I’ve made a mock website for my current job at the New York Hall of Science using Django to help the Exhibit Experience team automate and store data for daily operations in Design Lab.
2. I’ve created games such as Snake and Galaga both in Python and JavaScript.
3. I’ve created animations to visualize different sorting algorithms in both in Python and JavaScript with React.
4. Updated my twitter bot using AWSNS to send text messages to myself containing tweets of free machine learning resources.
5. Currently I’m working with DotDot through the Designers-in-Residence program at the New York Hall of Science to create a virtual reality game using Unity.

I’ve made some progress since the last time I created my portfolio and I think it’s time for an upgrade. All of the information on my website is hard-coded into the HTML, which probably isn’t the best option. Now that I’m familiar with Django I can store all that information on the backend and choose which projects to display on my portfolio. I’m going to use React for the front-end because I’ve always used Django for handling views but now that I know React, maybe I can connect the two.

The Tech Stack

I’ll be using Django to store all the information which will be my projects I want to display. Then I’ll create a REST API using Django Rest Framework which serializes data to communicate with other apps and then React to render the front end using this data.

Installing Django Rest Framework

Before we create the REST API we need to create a Django project and application. I won’t go over that in this series but I do have another article…