Advent of code 2025: the diaries

馃巹 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鈥檚 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鈥攄espite everything鈥攚e keep coming back to the terminal. ...

December 1, 2025 路 Andrea Manzini

From QEMU Headache to Headless

馃樃 TL;DR Being lazy, I made a tool to run qcow2 images for my convenience. It now supports x86_64, aarch64, s390x, and ppc64le. Feel free to use it if you find it useful! 馃摉 The back story If you鈥檝e ever typed qemu-system-x86_64 into your terminal, you know the feeling. A creeping dread. A cold sweat. The QEMU headache. It鈥檚 that special migraine reserved for developers who know they鈥檙e about to spend the next ten minutes deciphering their own shell history to remember that one magic flag for networking. ...

September 28, 2025 路 Andrea Manzini

How much code are you testing ? (3)

鈻讹笍 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鈥檙e cranking up the complexity. We鈥檒l 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 路 Andrea Manzini

Refactoring the D Koans with metaprogramming

馃挕 The problem Welcome back, it鈥檚 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 路 Andrea Manzini