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!

Automating OpenQA Job Cloning with Python and YAML

🎉 Happy New Year! As anyone working with OpenQA knows, it is a powerful tool for automated testing. But sometimes, the workflow around re-triggering those tests for investigation purposes can feel a bit… Manual. Recently, I found myself in a repetitive cycle while debugging complex test scenarios. My workflow looked something like this: Take a known “good” job URL. Open a scratchpad editor. Craft a long openqa-clone-job command with tons of specific override parameters (BUILD=0, custom git branches, skipping specific modules, etc.). Run the command in the terminal, wait for the output. Painfully visual scan of the terminal output, to identify the newly created job URLs, and select them with my mouse, to copy them. Paste them into openqa-mon or a text file to track their progress. Till now I used a Bash script that kind of helped, but modifying giant arrays of arguments for every different debugging scenario was annoying and error-prone. ...

January 7, 2026

Advent of code 2025: the diaries

🎄 Intro It is December, the most wonderful time of the year for programmers. But as we log in for Advent of Code (AoC) 2025, you might notice the atmosphere is a little different. We passed a decade of Eric Wastl’s incredible work, and with this milestone comes a significant shift in tradition. Before diving into solutions, I want to take a moment to reflect on the state of AoC this year, the changes we are seeing, and why—despite everything—we keep coming back to the terminal. ...

December 1, 2025 · Andrea Manzini

October 2025 conferences recap

Intro October is at an end, and I want to share a quick recap of my participation to some conferences. First of all, a big thanks to the organizers who dedicate their energy to these efforts, and to SUSE for supporting my attendance! Modena, Oct 4, 2025 : GDG DevFest 2025 Ancient, historical location : The venue was in the city center: an actual church and a teathre I managed to be there only on saturday modena.rb guys and linux booth! ...

November 1, 2025 · Andrea Manzini

Automated files cleanup on Linux

🧹 My Messy Linux Box As year passes, my Linux system, over the time, starts to get a little… Messy. My ~/Downloads directory is a digital dumping ground. It’s a collection of ISOs, test scripts, and those huge multi-gigabyte Virtual Machine images I need to test once and then forget about. Add to that ~/Pictures/Screenshots, which is overflowing with thousands of quick snaps I’ll never look at again. Disk space is cheap nowadays, but I like to have things nice and clean. I could go in and manually clean it… But who remembers to do that ? ...

October 23, 2025 · Andrea Manzini