As a web developer, often times you will be responsible for creating an API, or Application Programming Interface. Quite simply, your API takes in requests and returns structured responses. API design is one of the most useful skills you can master though it involves a lot of different moving parts: authentication, authorization, rate limiting for requests, serializing the data from the database into a structured format, etc. We'll walk through the most important parts of creating an API along with a framework to help us implement it in Django.

As an example, go to https://aws.random.cat/meow. This very simple API returns a random image url of a cat. You'll see an output like the following in JSON format:

{"file": "https:\/\/purr.objects-us-west-1.dream.io\/i\/UwL2m.jpg"}