I grew up in Nigeria.
I was the kid who was good at school and better at taking things apart. Whatever I ended up doing was going to involve computers — I'd worked that out early, well before I understood what the job actually was.
What I wanted out of it hasn't changed since: make things other people actually use, and give something back while I'm at it. At school that meant saving my lunch and handing it out on the walk home.
Hackers in films looked like superheroes to me.
So I made Tumblr backgrounds. Web pages in raw HTML, pulling things apart to see what held them together. I didn't know much code yet. I knew the internet, and I knew I wanted in.
I got hired out of a hackathon.
College took me a while. What finished it was a weekend competition — I walked out of it with an offer from American Airlines and stayed five years. Frontend, then backend, then platform.
Long enough to see how large software actually gets made, and to work out that I wanted to make something of my own.
- American Airlines
- 5 years
- Frontend
- Shipped
- Backend
- Shipped
- Platform
- Shipped
- Afrilingua
- Since 2025
Everywhere I've been, there were Nigerians.
Every city, every job, every airport — you find each other. There's a country's worth of us spread through other people's countries, and a country at home, and mostly the two don't talk.
I'd like the people here and the people back home to be thinking about the same things at the same time. That's the long version of what I'm building toward. The rest of this site is the near end of it.
A page that looks good was never the hard part.
A wedding, a convention, a burial that turned into a reunion. Anybody can get a good-looking page for one of those now — that's the easy hour. What nobody hands you is the rest of it: moving the date when the venue moves, taking the money, knowing who actually paid, and doing all of that from a phone on a Tuesday night.
People have brought me this sort of thing since long before I could code. It was flyers first. Technology has never been more within reach or better connected than it is now, and hardly any of that reaches the people it would help most.
So you get the thing you needed and I get to keep building. That's the arrangement.
This much is built.
These aren't mockups. They're live pages, and the pictures are photographs of them — you can open any of the three and stand on it.
And there's a lot more coming.
Here's what isn't built yet. Some of it I'm part-way through, some I haven't started, and the order isn't fixed — it moves depending on what people actually ask for.
If one of these is the thing standing between you and using this, tell me. That isn't a courtesy line — it's genuinely how I pick what to build next.
- Somewhere to be found
- Not built
- Finding a vendor you don't know
- Not built
- Moderation tools
- Thin
- Repeat events
- One page each
- Returns and disputes
- Stripe's refund
That's the whole story.
I'm in Dallas. It's still just me. If you're throwing something and you want a page for it, or you want to tell me what's wrong with this one, my address is taiwo.raji@afrilingua.ai. I'm the one who reads it.
Taiwo Raji · Dallas, Texas