About me and this blog

Hi! 👋 my name is Andrea Manzini. I’m an Unix System Administrator and a developer. As you can see, I enjoy minimalism and pragmatic solutions for a problem. I am focused on delivery, curious and enjoy learning new things. If you are interested, you can find my resume following this link or contact me using social links on this page. If you appreciate my work, you can buy me a book from my Amazon Wishlist. Thanks!

How much code are you testing ? (3)

▶️ Intro : Let Me Be On the previous post we continued our journey with a more complex scenario, using a mix of gdb and valgrind to trace all the function execution inside a given binary. This time, hold on because we’re cranking up the complexity. We’ll dive deeper into low-level analysis and explore how to use Intel PIN, a powerful dynamic instrumentation framework for manipulating and inspecting executable code at runtime. (Photo by FURQAN KHURSHID) ...

June 17, 2025 · Andrea Manzini

Refactoring the D Koans with metaprogramming

💡 The problem Welcome back, it’s been quite a long time since my last ramblings on the D Programming Language! This post is born from a necessity. An old project of mine, the D Koans, was using an external library to simplify unit testing, which is more or less the core of the whole project. Unfortunately, the library started giving some deprecation warnings when compiled with recent D versions. Since the D Language already has an internal unit testing framework, I thought it would be nice to remove the single dependency and rely only on the standard library. Initially, with some global search/replace, I managed to convert all the tests to unittest blocks. ...

May 21, 2025 · Andrea Manzini

How much code are you testing ? (2)

▶️ Intro On the previous post we started our journey with a very simple scenario, and we used a nice feature of the Go programming language to get a measure of how much % of the target program our test is exercising. This time I am going to experiment a Proof of Concept about how we can obtain a test code coverage metric estimation for a normal binary program, without any recompilation. ...

March 30, 2025 · Andrea Manzini

How much code are you testing ? (1)

☂️ Intro When your code includes a suite of unit tests, code coverage is an important metric to measure the test effectiveness and it’s rather easy to obtain; there are plenty of tools around. Image credits to: Nataliya Vaitkevich On the other hand, often we also need to do integration or E2E testing, as in our QA journey we are mostly running real world programs instead of single well-chosen functions. Let’s start with a basic use case, and prepare a simple program tailored for this purpose. ...

February 23, 2025 · Andrea Manzini