Programming

🎄 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. ...

💡 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. ...

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. ...

🎄 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. ...