I built and designed this website without any previously built components using Next.js, TypeScript, and Tailwind!
Feel free to contact me at ben.zhou@uwaterloo.ca or on LinkedIn!
Hey — I'm Ben, a first‑year Computer Engineering student at the University of Waterloo. I love turning ideas into practical software and hardware that make everyday life a little easier.
I work mostly in TypeScript, JavaScript, C++, and Python, and I've shipped full‑stack projects with frameworks like Next.js and Flask. Hackathons have taught me to build, break, and ship fast — skills I bring to every project.
The inside of a macroboard I completely designed and built
• Incoming for Fall 2025
• Optimized core AI generation features by developing custom architecture, accelerating response times to be 17.7x faster (15.4s → 0.87s avg), reducing token usage and slashing costs by similar margins
• Created a webscraper using Python to extract and score 100+ articles on Yahoo News for overall sentiments
• Developing ping testing functions in Python and C to verify connectivity across CAN networks
• Developed 12 firmware prototypes in C++ for iterative product validation
• Created a worker to handle and sanitize GPT-4o requests using TypeScript reducing request errors by 23%
• Improved page load times by 160%, and reduced LCP, leading to 3,800+ impressions and 1,100+ clicks