The short version of a long story.

I'm Cristian Tăbăcitu (roughly tuh-buh-CHEE-too) — Tabacitu, Taba or just Tab to friends; even my fiancée settled on Tab. Hence the domain. Bucharest, Romania. Building things on the internet since high school — 2004 or so, professionally since 2007.

The arc: freelance gigs through university, then my first real job at UPDIVISION — three people around one desk. I grew from junior dev to managing partner (today: board member), and two hundred shipped projects taught me scope, deadlines and other people's money. Nights and weekends, I built products of my own. Most of them died.

One didn't. My admin-panel tool — prototypes named Cornel and Viorel (after Romanian uncles), then Dick (after the terminal joke) — became Backpack for Laravel in 2016. Then it blew up. Suddenly thousands of developers depended on it, issues arrived faster than I could read them, and I had no systems for any of it — it swallowed me whole for a while. Building those systems is where I really learned to run a product company. Ten profitable years later, 2,000+ companies use Backpack daily and it needs a couple of my hours a week.

That freed me to go back to zero — the part I love most. I built the whole POV Tickets platform as co-founder and head of product (go-to-market is my other co-founder's show), and I'm in customer-interview season at TicketList. Why is a founder with three projects "free"? Because none of them needs my full days right now — and I've learned the hard way not to force the next big thing. I'm choosing it slowly, in public, with written filters.

What I believe fits in a few lines. Scratch your own itch, then check that anyone else itches. Use boring technology and spend the excitement budget on the product. Write things down — good code is also the words around it. Ship in weeks, listen hard, and have the guts to kill what isn't working — I've done it more times than I can accurately count, and it bought me the judgment I sell today.

Outside work: for seven years I split life between Romania and everywhere else — ten countries a year, trips from a week to six months. As of 2026, the deliberate opposite: a house, roots, a dog in the works. Somehow I became a coffee snob — AeroPress/V60 over espresso. In summer, watermelon season is sacred — my one social-media post a year announces the first one. And if you've used something I built and land in Bucharest, write me: I'd genuinely enjoy showing you my favorite spots.