Josip Šokčević

a.k.a. Šokac | e-mail: info (at) sokac.net

Hi there! I’m a software engineer living in San Francisco.

I grew up in Vinkovci, a small town in Croatia. I started tinkering with computers early in my life. I was very fascinated by how they work and their vast possibilities. I learned the Logo programming language at I.G. Kovacica Elementary School and attended a few national competitions (which, to my surprise, are still active!). Then, I did some web development (good ol’ LAMP stack), mostly for local business, personal projects, and community projects. blogeri.hr, a blog aggregator, won an award for the best Croatian website in the Media and News category in 2006 and linuxzasve.com, a Linux community website, won an award in 2009 for the best website in the Science and Education category.

I moved to Palo Alto for work, then went back to Croatia to finish my education and get a B.S. (and an M.S. later). I was lucky enough to get a US work visa and lived in San Francisco for many years. In 2025, I moved to Osijek, Croatia.

Jobs

Valley Labs d.o.o. (September 2025 - present)

• I just founded a company. If you are interested in consulting services, please check out valleylabs.hr.
• Clients: Perplexity AI
• Location: Osijek, Croatia
• Position: Director, Software Engineer

Google (Jan 2020 - May 2025)

• Team: P&D Source Developer Experience (Chromium & Android source)
• Location: San Francisco
• Position: Team Lead, SWE

Thumbtack (Nov 2015 - Jan 2020)

• Team: Infrastructure Engineering
• Location: San Francisco
• Position: Principal Software Engineer

The Backplane (July 2011 - Nov 2015)

• Team: Backend
• Location: San Francisco
• Position: Software Engineer

Software Skills

• Operating System: Arch Linux, Debian, Ubuntu
• Languages: Go, Python, Typescript, Javascript, PHP
• Databases: Postgres, MySQL, MongoDB
• Misc: Git, Gerrit, Vim, Distributed tracing (Zipkin), InfluxDB, CI/CD, Puppet, random other stuff

Hobbies

I work as a software engineer but I still like to write code as a hobby too (can it be called a hobby then?). Although, not as much as I used to. I also enjoy working with hardware - from building a PC to doing personal IoT projects, as well as playing casual chess. In general, I like to learn new things - from personal finance, blockchain, LLM / Gen AI to 3D printing, woodworking, BBQ and so much more.

These days, I spend most of my personal time with my family.