hjanuschka@terminal:~$

Helmut Januschka

Head of Engineering @krone.at • Open Source Contributor

25+ years experience Currently @krone.at Vienna, Austria
Blog
In Progress
IN REVIEW
January 2026

DevTools: Speculation Rules Filter

Adding text filtering to Chrome's Speculation Rules panel after real-world testing at krone.at.

IN REVIEW
January 2026

Fixing AV1 Hardware Encoding on AMD/Mesa

Deep dive into DPB management: fixing GPU crashes for WebRTC video calls. 21 patchsets later...

IN PROGRESS
December 2025

Lazy Loading for Video & Audio

Implementing loading="lazy" for media elements. Cross-browser collaboration with Squarespace.

IN REVIEW
January 2026

Fixing a 3.5-Year-Old Race Condition

Pseudonymization salt via shared memory. When the bug report is older than some interns.

Landed
LANDED
November 2025

JPEG XL Returns to Chrome

From "obsolete" in 2022 to welcomed back in 2025. Rust implementation within 4% of C++ performance.

LANDED
October 2025

From Tweet to Chrome: Tab Focus

A tweet from Tobi Lütke led to --focus flag. Focus existing tabs instead of creating duplicates.

LANDED
September 2025

Dynamic Chrome Themes for Omarchy

DHH needed CLI theming for Omarchy Linux. CLI switches for Material Design themes in record time.

LANDED
August 2025

Wayland Crash: Community Debugging

Chrome crashing on multi-monitor Wayland. Bug report to upstream fix in 72 hours.

Tools & Workflow
TOOLS
July 2025

Why I Switched to Pi

Terminal-first coding agent. Multi-model switching, session trees, extensible hooks.

Experiments
EXPERIMENT
February 2026

JPEG XL in PDF via PDFium

Experimental JXL-in-PDF decoding using jxl-rs. Alpha via synthesized /SMask, animation → frame 0.

About

I work as Head of Engineering at krone.at, focusing on engineering management, technical strategy, and system reliability. My background spans 25+ years across various technology domains.

I contribute to open source projects including Chromium, LLVM, PDFium, and Fastlane. Areas of interest include system performance, developer tooling, and infrastructure automation.

Current Roles

👔 Head of Engineering @krone.at
🏢 CEO & CTO @Captcha.eu
🌐 Chromium Committer
🛠️ Breaking browsers with C++
Experience & Focus

Engineering Leadership

Leading technical vision and engineering teams at scale. Experience building and maintaining systems that serve millions of users.

System Architecture

25+ years across the full technology stack - from low-level system programming to distributed cloud architectures.

Open Source Philosophy

Active contributor to major projects. Building tools that make developers more productive.

Entrepreneurship

Founded and leading Captcha.eu - a GDPR-compliant bot protection service hosted in Austria. Serves clients including ÖBB, Bauer Media Group, and E.ON with privacy-first, accessible web security solutions.

Current Stack @krone.at
• Multi-language web applications
• Kubernetes container orchestration
• Varnish + CDN for caching & optimization
• Legacy print CMS to digital publishing migration
• In-house mobile app development teams
• TV broadcast technology integration
• Real-time content delivery pipelines
• High-availability database clusters
• CI/CD & infrastructure automation
Open Source Contributions

Chromium

Chromium Committer. Key contributions include reviving JPEG XL support with a Rust decoder, the --focus flag for tab reuse, dynamic theming for Omarchy, and fixing long-standing bugs in tracing, DevTools, and media encoding.

LLVM Project

Enhanced clang-tidy modernization tools by implementing pattern detection for substr() operations that can be replaced with C++20 starts_with() method, improving code readability and performance.

Fastlane

Key contributor to iOS and Android deployment automation tool. Enhanced Spaceship module for App Store Connect integration, improved terminal responsiveness, and fixed critical build system compatibility issues.

Composer

Contributed to PHP's dependency manager. Implemented GitLab API v4 pagination support for repository discovery and improved tag/branch collection functionality for better package resolution.

VibeTunnel

Browser-based terminal multiplexer for frictionless remote access to macOS terminals. Designed for "vibe coding" - maintaining developer flow from anywhere. Core contributor to this innovative tool for monitoring AI agents and remote development.

Omarchy Chromium Micro Fork

When DHH called out for help with live theming in Chromium for his Omarchy Linux distribution, I answered the challenge. Now maintaining a micro fork that enables dynamic theme switching without browser restart. Working to upstream this patch while providing the feature to the Omarchy community through an AUR package.

Get In Touch

I'm always interested in discussing new projects, opportunities, or just chatting about technology.

Online

GitHub: hjanuschka
LinkedIn: in/hjanuschka
Twitter: @hjanuschka

Direct

Location: Vienna, Austria
Timezone: UTC+1
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