In a previous post, Automatic Enum Stringification in C via Build-Time Code Generation, I described how to extract enum labels and values directly from DWARF debug information at build time. enum color { C_NONE, C_RED, C_YELLOW, C_GREEN } ; // Request enum descriptor for e_color ENUM_DESCRIBE(e_color, enum color) void foo(enum color c) { printf("Color=%s(%d)\n", ENUM_LABEL_OF(e_color, c), c)
When you first learn to write software, you are building in a utopia. On your laptop, the database is always online. The network has zero latency. The third-party API always responds in exactly 12 milliseconds. You write a function, you hit run, and the data flows perfectly from point A to point B. In the industry, we call this the "Happy Path." It is the magical scenario in which every piece of t
Stop Using Hacks for Transparent Cutouts Imagine this scenario: your designer hands you a Figma file where a beautiful hero image fades into the background via a complex grunge texture or a smooth radial gradient. Or better yet, a scrollable list that subtly vanishes at the bottom to hint at more content. Ten years ago, we would probably have reached for a glass of whiskey and started hacking toge
Hello, I am currently making my own HTML+CSS+JS framework, you can view it at my GitHub Repository here: github.com/29cmosier-dev/ZiggyLabs-Framework I call it ZiggyLabs Framework for now, I might rename it, and my main goal is to reduce the HTML clutter that Bootstrap has, and possibly figure out more goals later. I would also like to show off my navbar, as you can see from this post's image abov
Today I started learning Python, and I explored some fundamental concepts that helped me understand how Python actually works behind the scenes. Python is a high-level, interpreted programming language. Being high-level means it is easy to read and write, as it is closer to human language and abstracts away hardware complexity. This makes it very different from low-level languages like assembly or
The cost incident that started this Three weeks after we put our chatbot into production, I opened the OpenAI billing dashboard on a Monday morning and stopped breathing for a second. One session — not one user, one session — had burned through roughly four times the daily budget for the entire app. Over a single afternoon. The session wasn't malicious. It was a test account someone forgot to lo
I wanted to figure out how people build payment systems without losing everyone's money. It turns out, my first attempt was a great way to lose a lot of it. I started with what felt like a simple Go service. One endpoint, one database table, and a third-party provider to handle the actual charging. The plan was straightforward: Decode the request. Call the provider to charge the user. Save the res
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