https://blog.tabini.ca/ Recent content on Marco Tabini's Blog Hugo -- gohugo.io en-us © Marco Tabini · All Rights Reserved Wed, 10 Jan 2024 11:19:11 -0400 https://blog.tabini.ca/post/ask-the-dumb-questions/ Wed, 10 Jan 2024 11:19:11 -0400 https://blog.tabini.ca/post/ask-the-dumb-questions/ Here’s a scenario that is likely to feel very familiar: You’re in a meeting, and you’re convinced that everybody is talking past each other because they are making a different set of unspoken assumptions about the topic at hand. You want to speak up, an idea or question simmering in your mind, but you end up dismissing it as too obvious or simple to voice. The fear of looking foolish The hesitation to ask simple questions often stems from a fear of judgment, a nagging imposter syndrome whispering that such inquiries might reveal incompetence. https://blog.tabini.ca/post/good-meetings-focus-on-problems/ Fri, 28 May 2021 10:19:11 -0400 https://blog.tabini.ca/post/good-meetings-focus-on-problems/ As you take on roles of increasing responsibility, your viewpoint on meetings tends to change: When you’re young and inexperienced, you desperately want into them, and when you’re old and experienced you desperately want to avoid them. The reason for this is fairly simple: Both the most junior and most senior member of the team have exactly the same number of hours in their day. When you oversee a big crew and you’re being pulled in a million directions, making sure that you run efficient meetings becomes more and more critical. https://blog.tabini.ca/post/success-is-boring/ Wed, 19 May 2021 10:19:11 -0400 https://blog.tabini.ca/post/success-is-boring/ A distressingly large number of business books I have read suffer from a strange form of survivorship bias that I call “success rot.” It goes a little bit like this: Company X is very successful. Company X uses Process/Technique/Tool Y. Therefore, Process/Technique/Tool Y is what made Company X successful. I’m never quite sure how one is supposed to learn anything from these books. For one thing, success is very context-dependent, and it involves a lot of luck and being in the right place at the right time. https://blog.tabini.ca/post/management-is-editing/ Wed, 12 May 2021 12:19:11 -0400 https://blog.tabini.ca/post/management-is-editing/ It seems obvious to me that decisions should always be pushed down as far as necessary to find the people who have the best knowledge to make them. Any responsible business will try to hire experts in whatever fields it needs, and they are most likely closer to the problems that needs solving than those above them in the orgchart. By definition, this means that managers should almost never be the ones making tactical decisions, because their focus is typically on breadth rather than depth, and, therefore, they are unlikely to be the ultimate experts in any kind of vertical problem space. https://blog.tabini.ca/post/powers-of-ten/ Wed, 05 May 2021 08:19:11 -0400 https://blog.tabini.ca/post/powers-of-ten/ All throughout my career, a common pattern has repeated itself time and time again: You want to do something that requires resources (money, people, time, and so forth); you ask for n resources; after much wrangling, the business gives you m resources, where m is significantly lower than n1. When I put together my first budget at Noom, therefore, I was prepared for the usual haggling; imagine my surprise when our COO Adam instead asked me what I would do if I had ten times the amount of money I was looking for. https://blog.tabini.ca/post/how-bandit-tests-really-work/ Wed, 05 Jul 2017 20:19:11 -0400 https://blog.tabini.ca/post/how-bandit-tests-really-work/ In preparation for a presentation, I recently found myself looking for a layperson’s explanation of how bandit testing works and why. I haven’t been able to find one that suits my needs; Wikipedia’s entry on the subject is at the same time short on details and rather arcane, while most of the articles I’ve been able to locate on the Internet seem more concerned with establishing bandit testing’s superiority to A/B—which, at least without a good number of caveats, is an absurd statement to make. https://blog.tabini.ca/post/the-importance-of-being-idle/ Thu, 23 Jun 2016 10:15:13 -0400 https://blog.tabini.ca/post/the-importance-of-being-idle/ Years ago, when I first moved into management, I seemed to suddenly have a lot of time on my hands: It looked as though the business had decided to give me more responsibilities, and yet needed me less at the same time. Sure enough, I had my projects and my meetings, but sometimes entire days would go by when the company simply placed no demands on me. I could have, figuratively speaking, fallen off the face of the Earth without anyone noticing (at least, I suppose, until I started missing deadlines). https://blog.tabini.ca/post/i-am-not-an-introvert--i-am-just-busy/ Wed, 05 Mar 2014 19:47:16 -0400 https://blog.tabini.ca/post/i-am-not-an-introvert--i-am-just-busy/ For a few weeks now I’ve been fighting with a really odd bug. I have a server process that opens a persistent connection to a service provider, authenticates the end user, and then performs a series of streaming operations. Inexplicably, every now and then this process leaks a socket. It doesn’t happen very often, but often enough that, after a while, the machine on which the server is running gets starved of resources and starts thrashing around as it queues requests that cannot be fulfilled. https://blog.tabini.ca/post/the-7-bit-internet/ Thu, 11 Jul 2013 13:26:09 -0400 https://blog.tabini.ca/post/the-7-bit-internet/ When I first started digging into the bowels of the Internet, I was fascinated by how many of its protocols—like HTTP and SMTP, for example—were entirely text based. At first, this struck me as a very odd thing; text is inefficient, and machines, not humans, are meant to interpret protocols. A binary setup would save bytes—bytes!—and be all-around more manageable by software. It wasn’t long, however, before I realized the true genius behind this decision.