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Jeffrey Zang almost did not go to the hackathon that changed his life.
It was JAMHacks 6, one of Canada’s largest high school hackathons, and the obstacle was not code. It was the idea of sleeping away from home. For a kid who was already interested in technology but not yet consumed by it, that small fear almost kept him from the room where everything would start to click.
He went anyway.
Those 48 hours did more than introduce him to hackathon culture. They shifted how he saw himself. Programming stopped being a subject, a hobby, or something interesting to try after school.
“I almost stayed home,” Zang said. “That is the part I think about now. The thing I was afraid to do became the thing that made me want to build for the rest of my life.”
The first spark came earlier. In Grade 5, a teacher showed his class Scratch during math. The program’s colored blocks gave him a simple but powerful idea: a person could arrange instructions and create something that moved, responded, and behaved. In Grade 6, his father introduced him to Python, and Zang began making small terminal games.
He was not the kind of learner who waited for a perfect course or a clean set of instructions. He preferred to install the thing, break the thing, and figure out what went wrong.
“I have never been great at learning by watching someone else do every step,” he said. “I learn faster when I am inside the problem. I want to touch it, mess it up, and understand why it failed.”
That instinct became the shape of his early career. After JAMHacks, he learned web development, landed his first internship at 15, completed four software internships before turning 19, competed in roughly 17 hackathons, and helped organize six. He went on to co-chair Hack the 6ix, Toronto’s largest hackathon, scaling it to more than 1,100 attendees and 200+ projects while helping raise more than $50,000 in sponsorship from companies including Microsoft, Deloitte, Warp, and Linear.
He also became the youngest co-chair in the event’s history.
On paper, that reads like early success. In practice, it meant being young in rooms where age was often treated as a weakness.
Companies hesitated to look at a high schooler. Sponsors sometimes spoke to him as if he had to prove he belonged before he had even begun the meeting. Zang noticed the skepticism, but he did not treat it as a reason to slow down.
“Being young made some people discount me,” he said. “Eventually I started thinking, okay, if I do the work anyway, then the age becomes part of the proof.”
The proof kept stacking up. Zang was named an MLH Top 50 honoree, selected from a global community of more than 500,000 hackers, and became the second-youngest recipient in the program’s history. He won Hack the North, Canada’s largest hackathon, with EcoRewards, an AI receipt-scanning rewards app that earned the RBC Award among more than 230 teams. He built Realistic Obama, a 3D-printed conversational robot created in 30 hours at Hack the North, which drew more than 150,000 social views and became the fourth-most-liked Hack the North project of all time.
Another project, motus, used eye tracking to control a wheelchair through AdHawk AR glasses and a Raspberry Pi. It was built in 24 hours at Hack the North 2023.
The projects were fast, strange, useful, imperfect, and ambitious. That was the point.
“Hackathons teach you that building is not precious,” Zang said. “You do not have months to make something perfect. You have to decide what matters, get it working, and show people.”
That mindset did not protect him from hard stretches. His first internship at uxSino started badly. He was new to Linux and Java. The documentation was outdated. He failed five operating system installs and had days when he solved no tickets at all.
“I remember feeling completely useless,” he said. “It was not one clean failure. It was waking up, trying again, and still not getting anywhere.”
The lesson was not that every problem turns quickly. Some do not. The lesson was that failure becomes less frightening after a person has gone through enough versions of it and kept moving.
He saw the same pattern while organizing ClockHacks. Two weeks before the event, the budget had only $50. Three days before, it had $700. It was the kind of situation that could have made the whole effort feel doomed. Instead, the team found a way through.
“That is the part people do not see,” Zang said. “A project can look dead for a while before it works. You learn to keep pushing when the evidence is not comforting yet.”
That persistence now follows him into Proletic, the company he is building while continuing as a computer science co-op student at the University of Waterloo, where he has a 4.0 GPA. Proletic is the latest version of a pattern Zang has followed for years: find a point of friction, build quickly, and test whether the idea actually helps people. This time, the friction is the daily grind of computer work.
By the time he reached Waterloo, Zang had already learned that a project only matters once it meets real users. That lesson followed him through his work as a founding engineer at 10x, where he helped build an AI app that reached 2,000+ users and profitability, and through his internship at Nokia, where an internal AI assistant he built was adopted by 200+ employees.
He also carried that lesson into Opus, a computer-use agent he launched in three days. The project reached 500+ beta users and drew more than 200,000 views, but Zang talks about it less as a finished achievement than as another example of what happens when an idea leaves the private folder and meets the world.
“Shipping changes the question,” he said. “Before you ship, you are guessing. After you ship, users start telling you what is real.”
Yet when Zang talks about what he has learned, he does not start with the numbers. He starts with commitment.
“The hardest part is not always ability,” he said. “A lot of things are buildable if you give them one to three months of real focus. The harder skill is choosing the thing and not drifting away from it.”
That is a mature lesson for someone whose career is still early. It is also the thread that connects the Grade 5 Scratch lesson, the first nervous hackathon, the failed installs, the sponsorship scrambles, and the company he is building now. Zang has learned that momentum does not arrive all at once. It is made through repeated decisions to stay with the work.
The fire metaphor matters to him. Hackathons gave him a passion that changed his life, and he believes that kind of passion spreads when people are willing to share it. He has spent much of his young career organizing events, leading builders, and making space for others to begin.
“I found my way because other people created a place where I could show up,” Zang said. “I want to keep doing that for the next person who is scared to go, or thinks they do not belong yet.”
Zang’s story keeps coming back to the same lesson. Starting young does not mean starting unready. Rough first attempts are still attempts. And sometimes the decision that changes everything is not a confident leap, but showing up anyway.
