About Ayotl
Ayotl (pronounced “ah-yotl”) is “turtle” in Nahuatl. It's one of the roots attributed to the name of Sahuayo, the town in Michoacán, Mexico, where the studio was born: the most repeated reading derives it from “tzacuatlayotl”, “turtle-shaped vessel”, from “tzacuatl” (vessel) and “ayotl” (turtle). There are other versions, as with almost every town etymology; this is the one that stuck.
The name says a lot about how the work goes here. A turtle doesn't run, but it gets there; it carries its house on its back and doesn't need much else. Ayotl's projects are like that: small, self-sufficient, with no investors and no rush, built by one person who uses and maintains them.
Ayotl builds software from Sahuayo for specific people: the region's businesses, people studying Japanese, and people who want a five-minute challenge every day. Each app has its own domain and its own life; Ayotl is the umbrella that brings them together.
Who's behind it
Behind Ayotl is Adrián Ceja Rentería, a software developer: about five years, the last three in Salesforce — Industries/OmniStudio, Order Management, Financial Services Cloud — and before that in RPA automation. He has worked at IBM, Bluetab, xpd global and now Ness Digital Engineering.
He studies Japanese and holds the JLPT N3, which is where JLPTest came from; he lives in Sahuayo, which is where Mercadito came from. Ayotl is what he does on his own, outside work.
LinkedInGitHub[email protected]
Open to Salesforce and integration work.
How it's built
Everything runs on the same foundation: Next.js and TypeScript, deployed on Railway with Docker, data in Supabase (Postgres), and the store apps as wrappers around the web. Code on GitHub, comments in Spanish.