Jesse Zhou Portfolio
An immersive 3D ramen shop built entirely in Three.js and Blender — the portfolio is the proof. Built by a management consultant who codes and does data science by night — every 3D model is his own.
Location
Remote-first, in the most literal sense — no idea where.
Skills
What makes it work
A breakdown of the choices that make this portfolio stand out.
The portfolio is the project
Instead of listing projects inside a conventional layout, Jesse's entire site is a single interactive 3D experience — a cyberpunk ramen shop you navigate in real time. Even the loading screen stays in character — a "Cooking Your Ramen…" progress readout with a hand-drawn bowl icon, followed by a single hand-lettered "START" prompt before the world unlocks — so the theme is established before a single 3D asset even finishes loading.
Concept-first, technology second
The ramen shop aesthetic is deliberate and coherent — lighting, textures, and sound all serve a single visual world. Most developer portfolios list skills; Jesse demonstrates taste. Employers hiring for creative-technology roles are selecting for this quality specifically.
Built from scratch, not from a template
Vanilla Three.js with no React Three Fiber wrapper, and every 3D model built from scratch in Blender. This signals deep understanding of the underlying graphics pipeline, which is exactly what separates 3D web specialists from developers who use wrappers without knowing what is underneath.
Narrative career arc
Jesse graduated from the Ivey Business School and works as a management consultant at Ernst & Young — the site calls him "a management consultant by day and developer / data scientist by night." The story itself is part of the pitch: a business-trained builder with uncommon visual sensibility, whose side projects span 3D web, NLP and computer vision.
What Full Stack Developers can take from this
Specific, actionable tips to apply to your own portfolio — no generic advice.
Make the portfolio itself the most impressive thing on it. If your skill is 3D web development, a 3D website proves the skill more completely than a list of projects inside a static layout.
Pick one aesthetic concept and execute it completely, down to the loading screen copy. A ramen shop, a spaceship, a record shop — the theme matters less than the commitment. Half-formed concepts signal half-formed execution.
Build on fundamentals, not wrappers. Learning vanilla Three.js before React Three Fiber gives you problem-solving capability that abstraction layers hide. When something breaks or performs poorly, you know where to look.
Career changers need a portfolio that does the convincing work your resume cannot. If you have no professional experience in the role, the portfolio has to be so obviously impressive that the conversation skips the experience question entirely.
Document the learning journey. Showing the work-in-progress is more relatable and shareable than just posting the finished result.
Projects
You're standing inside the portfolio: a ramen shop hand-built in Three.js and Blender, where projects are drinks in a vending machine and the résumé plays on a screen above the counter. Jesse Zhou built it as a management consultant coding by night, and the site settles the experience question before anyone asks it.
Three.js Ramen Shop Portfolio
A 3D, interactive ramen shop that serves as Jesse's portfolio. In the site's own words, it's a 'modern 3D and interactive take on the classic personal portfolio. Built using Javascript, and Three.js … optimized for all mobile and desktop devices.' The shop's screens hold the content: a big screen with About / Skills / Experience tabs, a vending machine whose bottles are projects, and an arcade cabinet showing credits. Visitors pass a 'Cooking Your Ramen…' loader and a hand-lettered START prompt before entering.
He built it as a management consultant who codes by night, which makes it a strong example of a portfolio outworking a resume. Concept, 3D modeling, illustration and WebGL code all come from one person, and the ramen-shop theme holds consistently from the loading screen to the vending machine.
Vanilla Three.js (no React Three Fiber) with GSAP for camera moves and Howler.js for sound
Every 3D model built from scratch in Blender, per the site's own project card
Content is diegetic: projects are drinks in a vending machine, credits play on an arcade screen
Compressed KTX2/Basis textures keep a detailed scene loadable on mobile
ASL Neural Network Translator
A team project with Western AI (2021): a neural network that translates American Sign Language signs to English letters in real time, through an interactive web app and a webcam. To make up for a limited dataset, the team used transfer learning, re-purposing a pre-trained general-purpose object detection model to detect ASL.
Transfer learning to work around a small dataset is the practical move real ML teams make. Pairing it with a real-time webcam interface shows the model was taken all the way to something usable.
Real-time webcam inference, not just offline accuracy numbers
Transfer learning from a pre-trained object detector to compensate for limited training data
Built as part of a student AI team (Western AI)
NFT Price Prediction Model
An automatic Scrapy scraper that collected NBA Top Shot transactions (sale price, player, team, type of play, rarity and more). A CatBoost gradient-boosting model trained on that data prices existing NFTs on the marketplace and predicts their value from known features.
Collecting his own dataset rather than downloading a clean CSV, then fitting a gradient-boosting model to a real pricing problem, covers the full data-science loop hiring teams want to see.
Self-built data pipeline: a Scrapy scraper over a live marketplace
Gradient boosting (CatBoost) on mixed categorical features like player, team, play type and rarity
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