Introduction
My name is Isaac Hank Lloyd, and I’m a young full-stack web developer living in St. George, Utah. I built this website to showcase the awesome stuff I make in my free time, and also to share my thoughts and ideas with people who might benefit from them over the internet. My eventual goal is to build a small community (and mailing list) of people who have similar interests as me, so I can get feedback on my projects and become better at what I do. So far, this site is only 402 days in the making and I haven’t reached that goal yet.
I started thinking like an engineer from a very young age. All of my hobbies grew out of soldering little electronics kits with my dad. Eventually, it got to the point where we built an oscilloscope and did a bit of programming on a knock-off Arduino board. When I was eleven, I took an after school class at Dixie State University which was run by a startup named CodeChangers. This class taught me the fundamentals of basic HTML & CSS syntax, as well as a little bit of P5.js on the side. I quickly outgrew these classes and began to teach myself how to code in JavaScript and PHP using the internet and of course-Stack Overflow. Lots and lots of Stack Overflow.
Still Learning
When I was fourteen, I built jeffthecow.com. It was a website for bypassing our middle school’s internet restrictions, mainly intended for playing games at school. I feel bad for my old teachers now, but it was a good experience for me. I learned more during this time than ever. This website took me from the quiet nerd in the front of math class to the most popular kid at school in just a few weeks. On the last day of my 9th grade school year, I received 2,000 sessions in a single six-hour period, which suggests that multiple schools in the district were taking advantage of my site at once. I am very grateful for the patience the school had with me, because I learned more from maintaining this website than I ever did in the front of that math class.
The next year, I began mountain biking for my high school. If there was any single thing that changed my life the most, it was my high school mountain biking team. I spent one year as an athlete and my second year as the team captain before graduating from high school in 2023. I was never really interested in sports growing up, but I am extremely grateful that mountain biking created an environment able to change my mind. If you would like to learn more about my experience with mountain biking and the largest high school sporting event in Utah, read about My NICA Why.
Unfortunately, I had to stop competing for my team after my early graduation (although I am still heavily involved because I love the people on my team so much). I left some of my favorite things behind at my high school in order to graduate early from Southwest High School in downtown St. George. Southwest High offers an awesome program for High School students of all ages to complete the requirements for a high school diploma at a rapid pace. I am very grateful for the people at Southwest and will always speak highly of them (Shoutout to Jan Goodwin and Ligia Fetzer).
Things To Come
I am now attending Dixie Tech's IT program. In the coming months, I would like to freelance a little bit of web development until I serve a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in fall of 2024. After my mission, I would like to get an IT or Development related job as I continue to learn through higher education. I also wish to coach for my high school mountain biking team.
- Isaac Lloyd | April 2nd, 2023