About Ivan Brezak Brkan

I Help Engineering Teams Show Their Expertise

I’ve spent more than 15 years at the intersection of developer communities and tech journalism — building one of Europe’s top tech media ventures, which I exited to a fast-growing unicorn. That experience taught me how to tell real engineering stories.

At Infobip, I lead the Developer Experience, Content and Startup department – working with our 800 strong engineering department to build our developer brand and community while improving our experience for builders.

Can we do it? I’m sharing everything I learn, from building our internal developer content culture to scaling our global Shift magazine and conferences, as well as my original venture – Netokracija.

You can follow along the journey through my newsletter and LinkedIn.

TLDR…

01.

Started the ‘Techcrunch of the Southeastern Europe’

Started blogging about startups and technology and ended up building a bootstrapped, regional media venture.

02.

Exited To The Bootstrapped European Unicorn

Netokracija was acquired by Infobip, where it and the team became the foundation of the developer content team.

03.

Helped 100s of Companies Talk To The Tech Community

You, you just know that developers are a specific audience. So brands like banks and telecoms, even tech scaleups, needed help to talk to them. I helped.

04.

Taught Over 350 Engineers To Write With a Nice Little Framework

As part of working with tech scaleups, I developed a framework (based on my experience as an editor) that helped developers go from no drafts to writing really, really well.

05.

Fell Asleep Learning PHP

There’s a reason I never learnt more than basic HTML and CSS… and it might have to do with me falling asleep at my first PHP workshop. No matter, made a better writer.

06.

Really Love ‘Brekky’

Breakfast culture isn’t really a thing in Croatia, where I’m from. So I became obssesed with it. From shakshouka to breakfast tacos, don’t take me out for dinner. Buy me breakfast.

Developer Content & Community

Some People Build Tech Companies. I Build Tech Audiences.

At tech meetups in the late ’00s I knew more about tech than most journalists and more about writing than most engineers. The engineers built tech startups, I built… a blog.

Thankfully, that blog ended up being very successful

Even Reddit Likes It

Award-Winning Developer Publication

Launched the developer magazine Shiftmag as an extension of our popular developer conference Shift.

Go to ShiftMag

200,000

Developers read Shiftmag the 1st year of launch

Starting out strong, our articles written like X, Y and Y did really well on developer subreddits and in developer media.

2 Awards

For marketing, of all things.

Our streamlined process delivers impactful solutions within tight timeframes, helping you move fast without compromising quality.

Featured in

It Started As A Blog

‘Techcrunch of Southeastern Europe’

Techcrunch said it, we built it. Netokracija went from a group blog to the largest technology media brand in the whole region, including our popular podcasts, Netokracija Podcast and Office Talks.

Go to Netokracija

Netokracija is our spark of hope and optimism – the media company that covers tech projects, innovation and startups with enthusiasm and professional knowledge, in the way those who are able to retrieve a hope in a better future for this part of the world – deserve.

Mate Rimac

CEO, Bugatti Rimac

Is there a way to do it?

Writing Workshops for Engineering teams (With a 9.71 NPS Score)

From helping our tech clients at Netokracija to now building our internal developer content culture at Infobip, I’ve developed a framework for turning engineers into content creators.

It helps engineering teams show their expertise, improve their work – while building the developer brand of their organisation along the way. I hope to turn it into a book soon… Until then, I’ll share what I learn in my newsletter.

Ask how they work