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!

Systemd Socket Activation Explained

💭 What ? Imagine a web server that only starts when someone actually tries to access it. Or a database that spins up only when a query comes in: this is the magic of socket activation. The concept is not new, as old-school sysadmins may are used to see something like inetd or xinetd for on-demand service activation in the past. As some cool projects like cockpit have already started using this little-known feature, in this blog post we’ll see the basics and try to get familiarity with the tooling. ...

February 2, 2025 · Andrea Manzini

Writing shell filters for fun and profit

Why ? During my daily job I have sometimes to debug failed openqa test jobs. One of the testing mantra is to reproduce the issue and for that task the openqa community has developed some tooling. In practice, I often have some output like this one below from some job cloning operations: Cloning parents of sle-15-SP4-Server-DVD-Updates-x86_64-Build20250112-1-fips_ker_mode_gnome@64bit 1 job has been created: - sle-15-SP4-Server-DVD-Updates-x86_64-Build20250112-1-fips_ker_mode_gnome@64bit -> https://openqa.suse.de/tests/16425390 Cloning parents of sle-15-SP5-Server-DVD-Updates-x86_64-Build20250112-1-fips_ker_mode_gnome@64bit 1 job has been created: - sle-15-SP5-Server-DVD-Updates-x86_64-Build20250112-1-fips_ker_mode_gnome@64bit -> https://openqa.suse.de/tests/16425391 Cloning parents of sle-15-SP4-Server-DVD-Updates-x86_64-Build20250112-1-fips_ker_mode_gnome@64bit 1 job has been created: - sle-15-SP4-Server-DVD-Updates-x86_64-Build20250112-1-fips_ker_mode_gnome@64bit -> https://openqa.suse.de/tests/16425392 And when I want to monitor those jobs, I’d need to copy-paste all the job URLs and pass them as arguments to the cool openqa-mon utility which will show and notify me of the job status in the terminal. ...

January 19, 2025 · Andrea Manzini

Debriefing Advent of Code 2024

🎄 Intro After a very interesting and fun SUSE hackweek, as every December since some years, I took part to Advent of Code. First of all, I wish to thank Eric Wastl because he’s giving us every year a great and unforgettable advent-ure. [image source: Reddit u/edo360 ] ✨ What’s Advent of Code ? More than just a countdown to Christmas, AoC is a joyful game that invites developers of all age and levels to sharpen their problem-solving abilities and coding skills. Like a virtual advent calendar, AoC presents a new programming puzzle each day from December 1st to 25th. These puzzles are often deceptively simple at first glance, but they quickly unfold into intricate challenges requiring clever algorithms and efficient code. ...

December 26, 2024 · Andrea Manzini

Wrapping up GoLab 2024

Intro Since 2015, GoLab is one of the oldest and most renowned conferences about the Go Programming Language ecosystem in the world, attracting a large audience of Gophers from all over the globe. My bad, I forgot to take a picture of the t-shirt 🤷 In recent years, the organizers hosted some of the biggest names in the industry who have shared their insights and experiences with our attendees. ...

November 15, 2024 · Andrea Manzini