David Saintloth:
CLASS OF 1989
Brooklyn Technical High SchoolClass of 1989
Brooklyn, NY
CUNY City CollegeClass of 1997
New york, NY
CUNY College Class of 1991
Staten island, NY
David's Story
Life
Hello all, though HS was a horrible nightmare of an experience for me I have overcome the issues and want to connect with some old friends. I went on to college after tech and got a degree in Electrical Engineering from CCNY in 1997. I vowed on commencement day that I would be running my own business in no more than 5 years. As a start I worked on campus for a year as a network admin at an on campus institute and after a year I jumped into the world of pc consulting working as a LAN and PC administrator/technician at Chase Manhattan Bank. Some of you may remember that I was always doodling in my high school notebooks, my experience with a well known Techie (who could draw better than I did and actually did the T shirt design for the Aeronautics major senior t shirt) led me to persue serious study of illustration while in college. While learning about Laplacian Transforms, Control Systems and Digital Signal Processing I also learned about expressing motion in a sketch, illustration emotion, using light and shadow to define form as well as the keys to composition, my skills improved. I got to the point where I did some part time work as a logo and graphic designer just prior to working at Chase. After two years at Chase I was bored out of my mind! In late 99 I quit and set my sights on hard core programming, EE as a major is great for acquiring all types of knowledge and programming was required for circuit simulation purposes so turning myself into a programmer wasn't too difficult(I'd been writing scripts and web pages for years up to that point) two weeks after tendering my resignation at Chase I had a job offer from TheStreet.com (which still amazingly is in business) I was hired as a content management producer, we were building components on an in house content management system written in perl, javascript, html, sql, tcl and xml on Vignette and Dynamo platforms. (Reads like a resume I know..) I absorbed everything I could about xml as I saw it as the future...sure enough, 4 years later xml is taking over everything (Microsoft's .NET framework CLR is built around an xml hieararchy) Around November of 2001 after several rounds of layoffs to avoid extinction I myself was layed off from TheStreet, it was okay I was going to quit in the next month anyway as my 5 year vow was about to arrive. Around the same time I started work on my own Content Management System, a year later I incorporated and now almost 2 years later the software is ready for primetime...and the story continues.....
Looking to hear from some of my old EE major technite friends!
College
Ah my City days, entered the place as a super shy kid and left king of the Universe! I always say that college is land of the over confident and underskilled my experiences there proved that. However, while it seemed everyone was busy thinking they knew it all I was in awe of what I didn't know. City as any fellow alum knows is huge, it has one of the largest library systems in the NYC proper. I spent so much time in the NAC building library researching for various papers, gaining side information for my subjects and reading up on the history of art and technique. I spent about as much time in the Science building in the basement reading professional publications from the ACM (Associated Computing Machinery), IEEE, and Siigraph. I read the seminal papers surrounding the topics of study I was covering in class by the actual mathematicians and physicists who created them, I also learned about topics in my own study (the history of computer graphics in computer science being most notable) Toward my last few years a new Music library opened in Stienman Hall, back then it was the single most quiet place in the school! You could hear a pin drop in there and thus all the engineering majors coopted it as the study area (since NAC and Sci sometimes were too packed)..of course this solace from the common rabble of the school didn't last long as later other majors "discovered" the library but it was still one of the best places to actually get studying done! I was a divided person in college, during the day learning about many aspects of engineering and social science by night drawing, sometimes well past midnight when I should have been doing more study for my class exams. I never had the discipline to just sit down and study for too long before I went back to drawing. As a consequence my grades could have been better in my courses but I always got the lectures(probably why I felt I didn't need to study ...bad idea!), but remarkably near my senior year things started to click anyway. I started finding correlations between things I'd studied in different classes, it all started making sense TOGETHER. I fully enjoyed the power of differential equations as they formed the basis of tools used in engineering to perform circuit analysis in both analog and discrete time signals, they allowed us to describe electromagnetic interactions (vis a vis Maxwells equations) so that we could design wave guides, (that's antenna to laymen) they allowed us ...Expand for more
to define control systems behavior and design constraints via the Laplacian Transform, were seen again in partial differential form in thermodynamics, resurfaced yet again in electronic circuit design in the form of the powerful Fourier Transform, in Digital Signal Processing class discoveries made only in the last 40 years led to the Fast Fourier Transform (with which modern cell phones, satellite digital tv and cd players simply would not be possible) and the Z transform. As I said before everything just came together, I'd wake up in the middle of the night and hit my books to confirm connections I'd made in my dreams (yeah I am a geek) to this day what I learned and continue to learn from my college days is used in my life as a programmer. I use "transforms" all the time, using programming constructs that essentially are the same type of beast. (For the coders..Casting a type dynamically from one to another is a transform!) So, you are probably thinking all this talk of actual learning did this guy have a social life in school, well sort of...one complex and convoluted "relationship" from which I learned EVERYTHING I was going to need to know about dating and all that other mess, and I survived that and the college experience! ;)
Workplace
After graduating from college I swore to work in the "field" for no more than 5 years (see life bio) my first start was as a network administrator on campus at City College. IRADAC was an on campus art institute and I was hired to set up the network of computers in the offices and do other computer related things (like set up printers and enter data into spreadsheets!) I worked there for just over a year before going on the hunt for a "real" job off campus. I interviewed for about 3 months and landed an assignment as a pc support consultant at Chase (see work history) this wasn't a direct job with Chase. See back in the late 90's many "consulting companies" were playing a new game in order to soak up all the extra money corporations were swimming in thanks to the (then) booming economy, they hired fresh grads (as I was) offered them moderate saleries and then leased them out to big corporations for much bigger bucks. (I discovered later that I was being leased out for almost three times what I was paid!) It was cool, the experiences with pc's that I'd been gaining essentially my entire college career made my skill set very valuable in the mid to late 90's and even at a fraction of consulting lease I was very happy. I had already invested in pc equipment while at City by taking out a $5,000 student loan in my last year to buy a pc that I used to improve my skills further. Good thing too, as it helped me land the Chase job, by mid 99' I'd paid off the load, had experienced 3 raises and 1 promotion, completed a MCSE certification and was starting to get bored of my Chase job. One of the reasons for my vow had to do with the little "politics" I'd experienced working on campus at IRADAC and before that as a work study student in a computer lab...I didn't like it. Inter office politics sucks...many people were looking after their own turf and would sell you up the river to protect it..I despised this dishonorable element that was brought out by the work environment in college and I feared would be worse in the "field". Sure enough Chase was a den of corporate sociopaths, people doing anything to keep their little piece of dirt or prevent the rise of others (sad really)..I stayed out of it, concentrating on my work and studies eventually getting a promotion to a site where I had sole responsibility for 80 or so users in one of Chase banks midtown towers. After implementing various automated procedures to keep things running I had nothing to do most of the day, the problems that plagued the users before my arrival went away, they were happy but I became bored! In late 1999 I decided to start job hunting, barely a week and a half later I had an interview with TheStreet.com and a week later they made an offer. The job would throw me into a bleeding edge content management system running the companies web site, built in house using pretty much every technology in the book..it was the perfect way to fill out my knowledge of sofware engineering to match the networking and hardware knowledge that I had from college and Chase. The kicker was the fact that XML was being used at the company and being essentially brand new at the time I thought it was the future of IT. While at TSC I learned Sql,Tcl,Java and later XSL by my forth month I knew what I'd be basing my business on when my 5 years in the field were up (due in 2002) namely, design and license my own Content Management System. I started coding of the project in late August of 2001, in November I was layed off from TSC which turned out to be a blessing as I was able to get unemployment insurance which I didn't plan for. This allowed me to delay by almost a year going into the savings I'd built for running the business. I Incorporated Apriority LLC in 2002 and will be going live with a licensed product soon....
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