Personal
4 minute read
Who I am and what I build
I am Chiatiah Rayan, a full stack engineer in Buea, Cameroon. What I build, who I build it for, and how I work with the people who hire me.
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Chiatiah Rayan
rayanstudio
On this page11 sections
Who I am
My name is Chiatiah Rayan Nguea. Most people call me Rayan. I am a full stack engineer in Buea, Cameroon, and I publish my work as Rayan Studio.
I have been writing code since 2021 and shipping production systems for five years. I work in English and French, with clients in any country.
I think in systems and I build on purpose. The software I am proudest of is the kind nobody comments on, because it did what the person expected and then got out of the way.
Where I build from, and why it shows
Buea is not where this industry usually looks, and it is where I learned to build. Software here has to survive the connections people actually have, take the money people actually carry, and speak both languages on the street.
What I am building now
Twynsa
Twynsa is a social app built around one question. Who out there looks like you? You scan your face from five angles, and the app returns the people whose faces come closest to yours, ranked, with a number on each one. Around the matches there are posts, chats, calls, rooms, lookalike challenges, coins and a marketplace for usernames.
I am building every part of it alone. The web app, the servers behind it, the face matching service, the admin tools and the marketing site. The web version is finished as an MVP and the phone app is next. Of everything I work on, this is the one I enjoy the most, because somewhere out there two strangers share a face and neither of them knows the other exists.
migrail
migrail reads database migrations the way the database will run them and says what will lock before you merge. It catches the two-line change that passes code review and then takes a production table offline. v0.1 ships 25 rules across PostgreSQL 12 to 18, and every lock claim in it is checked against real databases rather than taken from the documentation. I released it free under Apache-2.0, with no paid tier and no account, and it stays that way.
Client work
Alongside those, I take on client projects end to end.
What I build with
React and Next.js with TypeScript and Tailwind on the frontend. React Native with Expo for mobile, so one codebase reaches both the App Store and Google Play. Go or Node.js on the backend. PostgreSQL as the default database, with Redis beside it for caching, rate limits and job queues, and MongoDB when a project already runs on it.
Docker for packaging, GitHub for code, Figma for design, n8n for automation, Stripe for payments. Claude Code and Codex are part of how I work every day, with agents, skills and MCP servers set up around the projects I return to.
How I work
A working version comes first. I get something real in front of people early, then change it based on how they use it rather than on what we assumed before launch.
One person owns the whole path. Design, frontend, backend, deployment. A client never has to hold two developers in sync, because both of them are me.
Measure, then optimise. A slow page or a janky interaction goes on the bug list like any other bug, and it gets a number attached before it gets a fix.
Write for the next person who opens the file. Each function does one job, and the difficult parts sit behind small interfaces. That next person is usually me, six months later, with none of the context I have today.
This site
I built rayanstudio.dev on Next.js 16. Behind the public pages there is a portal where I write articles, publish projects, send newsletter announcements and read the messages that come through the contact form. This article started as a draft in it.
What people I work with say
Nzenong Kombou Mc Braxton, a full stack software engineer and software architect, on working with me:
Talented software engineer with strong critical thinking skills. Brings unique perspectives and creative solutions from Central Africa. Technical expertise and passion make him a valuable team asset.
Ojong Franck, a software engineer I studied with:
Rayan is a highly skilled software engineer with a keen eye for detail. His ability to translate complex requirements into efficient code is impressive.
Work with me
If you have a web app, a mobile app or an automation to build, book a 15 minute call or send a message from the contact page. Tell me what you want to build and when you need it, and I will tell you honestly what the first version should be and what it will take to get there.