The Company
Tiny Giant Books is a tiny, boutique publishing house specializing in helping technologists have a better life.
Where We're Located
Tiny Giant Books is located in beautiful Bedford County, Virginia, in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains.
We're near both Virginia Tech and UVA, and about a 4-hour drive from Washington, DC.
A closer look at our location. No, we do not have cows.
Daniel B. Markham
Daniel B. Markham has over 30 years in the technology industry, writing his first commercial program when he was 17 on an Apple IIe.
Daniel continues programming, writing at least one commercial app each year. He codes in VB, C#, Java, Javascript, and SQL. Lately he has taken a most unhealthy interest in functional programming, and codes mostly in F#, although Haskell is on the Christmas wish list. He knows all the web technologies and sometimes uses tables in his html, no matter whether he should or not.
He lives with his wife and their two teenage children in their rural home and travels worldwide providing speaking, mentoring, coaching, and consulting services
Our Values
We believe strongly in these things:
People deserve the same opportunities. We treat everybody as if they are well-meaning and want a fulfilling and meaningful life. Yes, there are some people who need to be treated with care, but by and large people are good, systems of people are bad.
People are unconsciously their own worst enemies. We find when looking at systems of people that over and over again people get exactly what they want and it destroys them. We may be built for small tribes on the savanna, but man is not adapted socially to working in complex technological environments. We all have flaws, and given enough lattitude, we would all destroy things -- without ever meaning to.
Teams are families. In both a good and bad way, teams are families. We are all there to look out for each other's blind spots. We need each other.
The "team as family" idea doesn't scale out past a small number of people. Wish they did. Wish we could all hold hands and sing kumbaya, but something happens to teams and organizations between 10 and 200 people. What works with 5 people does not work with 50. This is critically important to realize and plan for. I don't have all the answers, but I know reasoning by extrapolation is inadequate.
Treat people as you would want to be treated -- if you were them. Not as you would want to be treated, because we are all different. Treat people in a way that they would want, not as you would want.
A small amount of stress is healthy. It's how we learn. Stress can come from within, as in a desire for more knowledge, or it can come from outside, as in wanting to do a good job so you don't get fired. No matter where it comes from, stress is useful to help clarify priorities and enhance focus. Too much stress, of course, is a terrible thing. But without any stress, we do not grow.
It is up to each of us to make choices to assign meaning to our lives. We can't control our environment, or our options (to some degree), but we can control our reaction to life and by those choices show to ourselves and others what our values are.
