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!

Zig Day 2026 recap

Intro Yesterday, February 21st, I had the pleasure of attending Zig Day Milan 2026, a fantastic event dedicated to the Zig programming language. It was a full day of learning, coding, and meeting great people in the beautiful city of Seregno(Milan) ⚡ What is Zig? For those who might not know, Zig is a general-purpose programming language and toolchain for maintaining robust, optimal, and reusable software. It’s often seen as a modern successor to C, but it brings so much more to the table. ...

February 22, 2026 · Andrea Manzini

A Friendly Guide to Podman Quadlets

🦎 Hi geekos! If you’ve been running containers on your Leap or Tumbleweed machine, you probably started with podman run commands. Maybe you moved to Docker Compose files to manage stacks. Those are great tools, but they have a limitation, as they don’t integrate natively with systemd, your operating system’s init system. When your server reboots, do your containers start back up automatically? If a container crashes, does it restart? How do you view its logs alongside your system journal? ...

February 3, 2026 · Andrea Manzini

A Headless Linux Router Build

👻 Void in the Basement I have a basement, and I have a problem: no WiFi signal in said basement. I have also a piece of e-waste that refuses to die: a Samsung N130 netbook from 2009. It has a single-core Atom processor and 1GB of RAM. By modern standards, it can barely open a web browser. But for a Linux terminal, It’s a supercomputer. Instead of buying a generic ~10€ WiFi repeater, I decided to turn this little warrior into a fully programmable, secure, and transparent WiFi router using Void Linux. Here is exactly how I did it. ...

January 24, 2026

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