Writing My Own Django Serializer for camelCase — Until I Found the One-Line Fix

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When you’re building a Django REST API and the frontend is speaking fluent camelCase while Django insists on snake_case… you end up playing translator.

And it’s annoying. Every request is a mess of renamed fields, unnecessary mappings, and serializers that look like a jungle of overridden variables.

Let’s be real — this isn’t where you want to spend your energy.

Take a basic Django REST Framework (DRF) model, for example:

class User(models.Model):
 first_name = models.CharField(max_length=100)
 last_name = models.CharField(max_length=100)

When serialized, this becomes:

{
  "first_name": "John",
  "last_name": "Doe"
}

That’s fine for Django. But your frontend dev? They’re expecting:

{
  "firstName": "John",
  "lastName": "Doe"
}

Sure, you can manually map every field:

class UserSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
    fullName = serializers.CharField(source='full_name')
    createdAt = serializers.DateTimeField(source='created_at')