Recent School Grad Builds Python Restaurant Bot as First Coding Project

Dilesh Zingare, a recent 12th-grade graduate, has shared his first Python project and first written article on DEV Community. The project, called 'Soul the Restro Waiter,' is a command-line restaurant simulation that handles menu display, order taking, quantity input, and bill generation. Zingare discovered the platform through online research and decided to document his early coding journey as a step toward becoming a Developer Advocate. He acknowledged his beginner status and openly invited feedback from readers to help him improve. The project marks the start of his self-taught programming path despite a disappointing exam result that initially shook his confidence.

US weighs delaying Taiwan arms sales

Humans outpollute nature in 25% of coastal waters

Warren Buffett's Son Howard Named Next Berkshire Hathaway Chairman

Howard Buffett, son of legendary investor Warren Buffett, has been appointed as the next Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway. The move marks a significant leadership transition at one of the world's most prominent conglomerates. Howard, known primarily for his philanthropic work, will step into the chairman role as part of a long-planned succession strategy. The transition had been widely anticipated, with Warren Buffett having signaled the change well in advance. This appointment formally sets the stage for a new era of leadership at Berkshire Hathaway.

Trump Eyes Greenland to Strengthen Golden Dome Missile Shield Against Russia, China

President Trump is pursuing a deal involving Greenland as part of a broader strategy to bolster the United States' Golden Dome missile defense system. The administration aims to have the Golden Dome fully operational by January 2029, with an estimated cost of $175 billion. However, analysts and critics have cast doubt on both the ambitious timeline and the steep price tag. Adding to concerns, interceptor tests conducted over the past two decades have recorded a success rate of only around 50%, and those tests were carried out under conditions far less demanding than a real-world attack scenario.

US begins building border wall in Texas' Big Bend

Oracle PL/SQL Exception Handling: Types, Rules, and Code Examples Explained

Oracle PL/SQL exceptions are runtime error conditions that interrupt normal block execution and transfer control to a designated EXCEPTION section for handling. PL/SQL classifies exceptions into three types: predefined Oracle server errors (such as NO_DATA_FOUND and ZERO_DIVIDE), non-predefined server errors that require manual declaration and binding via PRAGMA EXCEPTION_INIT, and user-defined exceptions raised explicitly by developers for custom business logic. Only one exception handler executes per block run, and the WHEN OTHERS clause, if used, must always appear last in the EXCEPTION section. Non-predefined exceptions are linked to specific ORA- error codes at compile time using the PRAGMA compiler directive in the DECLARE section. Understanding these categories and their declaration requirements helps developers write more robust and maintainable PL/SQL code.

Trump's new, stricter Green Card rules kick in

How to Write Structured Prompts for MiniMax H3 AI Video Generation

A practical guide published on DEV Community outlines a structured approach to writing prompts for MiniMax H3, an AI video generation model. The guide argues that effective prompts should function like production specifications, covering subject, action, camera movement, lighting, timing, and audio in separate, purposeful sentences. A key recommendation is to describe motion as a timeline, breaking a clip into timestamped segments to convey what happens between frames rather than just the final image. The guide also advises separating subject motion from camera motion to avoid conflicting instructions, and using precise cinematographic terms such as 'slow dolly-in' instead of vague phrases like 'cinematic camera movement'. These techniques are presented as ways to make AI video prompts easier to debug, reuse, and control across use cases like product reveals, fashion shots, and vehicle videos.

How to Debug R8 Release-Only Android Crashes Without Disabling Optimization

Android developers often encounter crashes that appear only in release builds when R8 minification is enabled, while debug builds run without issues. These failures typically stem from runtime dependencies — such as reflection, JNI, or dynamic class loading — that static analysis tools like R8 cannot fully trace. Rather than disabling R8 or applying blanket keep rules, developers should first retrace obfuscated stack traces using R8's mapping.txt file to identify exactly which class or method is missing at runtime. The key question to ask after retracing is what runtime mechanism expected a particular class, method, or field to remain accessible — not just which class crashed. Inspecting the merged R8 configuration from build outputs, rather than only proguard-rules.pro, helps pinpoint whether a problematic rule originated from the app, Android tooling, or a third-party dependency.

Rain saves Western Australia after Fraser-McGurk and Thornton dominate

Western Australia faced a difficult position in their Sheffield Shield match after Henry Thornton claimed four wickets to put the home side under pressure. Jake Fraser-McGurk delivered a powerful batting onslaught that further complicated matters for WA. Debutant Kieran Elliott provided a crucial rescue act for Western Australia, steadying the innings at a critical stage. However, it was ultimately rain that intervened and prevented a decisive result in the match.

IIT Bombay Student Dies by Suicide After Being Caught Using ChatGPT in Exam

A student from IIT Bombay's Department of Energy Science and Engineering died by suicide after being caught using ChatGPT during an examination. The institute confirmed that the student had uploaded the exam question paper to the AI tool to obtain answers. The incident has triggered protests on the IIT Bombay campus. The case has raised serious questions about academic integrity policies and the mental health support available to students at premier institutions.

UK Finance Teams Lose Days Monthly to Workflow Gaps, Not Spreadsheets

Recent fintech research highlights that UK businesses lose several days each month to manual finance administration, but the core problem lies in fragmented workflows rather than spreadsheet use. Finance processes involve chains of handoffs, approvals, and exception handling that no single tool adequately addresses, meaning replacing spreadsheets with dashboards often just relocates the same inefficiencies. Automation rate alone is a misleading metric, since even systems that auto-process 98% of transactions can still feel manual if the remaining edge cases create queues and delays. Engineers building financial products are advised to prioritise exception handling from the outset, ensuring every material decision is traceable by source, rule, reviewer, and repeatability. A layered architecture separating observed facts, proposed interpretations, and accepted decisions is recommended to enable auditability and continuous model improvement without distorting historical records.

Router-First Architecture Beats LLM Cascades for Latency-Sensitive Apps

For interactive applications, choosing between LLM routing and cascading is a critical engineering decision that directly affects latency, cost, and user experience. A predictive router selects a single model before generation, adding only 2–35ms overhead while delivering predictable tail latency and no redundant token processing. Cascades, by contrast, send every request through a cheap model first and escalate to stronger models when a verifier fails — meaning even a 1–3% escalation rate can eliminate most cost savings. Experts recommend a router-first approach for apps with strict response-time requirements, especially when traffic includes clearly classifiable tasks like extraction, summarization, or FAQ responses. Cascades remain preferable only when outputs are easily verifiable and accuracy matters more than tail latency.

How LectuLibre Built a Chunking Pipeline to Translate Full Books Using AI

Startup LectuLibre developed an AI-powered book translation pipeline after discovering that sending entire books to large language models in one request was too costly, unreliable, and prone to quality degradation over long contexts. The team split books into overlapping token-aware chunks of roughly 3,000 tokens each, using tiktoken for precise token counting after finding LangChain's character-based splitter caused chunks to exceed model limits. Each chunk is translated using Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet alongside a dynamic context buffer containing a running glossary of character names and terms, plus a rolling summary of previously translated chapters stored in PostgreSQL. After translating each chunk, the pipeline extracts new terminology and generates a short summary to carry forward into the next chunk, preserving stylistic and narrative consistency throughout. For a typical 120,000-word novel, this approach produces around 60 chunks, with the assembled output forming a complete, context-coherent translated book.

Microsoft Agent Framework Harness enables autonomous multi-step AI agents in C#

A developer tutorial published on DEV Community explains how to use Microsoft Agent Framework's Agent Harness to build autonomous, multi-step AI agents in C#. The Harness wraps an IChatClient with a bounded loop runtime, eliminating the need to manually write iteration logic, tool approval, and context management. The article walks through a real example called TopicResearchAgent, a console app that autonomously researches a given topic by decomposing it into questions, running multiple Tavily Search queries, and compiling a structured report. The agent decides on its own when sufficient evidence has been gathered, using a LoopEvaluator as the stopping condition. Full source code for the example is available on GitHub.

Mutation Testing Tools Tested for File Cleanup After Forced Kills

A developer built a conformance suite to test whether four popular mutation testing frameworks — mutmut, cosmic-ray, Stryker, and PIT — leave source files in a mutated state when forcibly terminated mid-run. The test method hashed the source tree, launched each framework, waited until a file was visibly mutated on disk, killed the process, then hashed the tree again. Three of the four tools — mutmut, Stryker, and PIT — were found to be architecturally safe because they either mutate copies or work entirely in memory, never touching the original source files. cosmic-ray, however, edits the actual source file and restores it only after completing a mutation cycle, meaning a SIGTERM signal sent by a timeout before restoration leaves the file permanently mutated. The finding is described as narrow in scope, affecting only interrupted runs of cosmic-ray rather than its normal operation, but it highlights how architecture provides stronger safety guarantees than signal handling alone.

Trump to Personally Greet Xi Jinping at Andrews Air Base for State Visit

US President Donald Trump will personally receive Chinese President Xi Jinping at Joint Base Andrews near Washington, DC, when Xi's plane lands on Wednesday. Senior administration officials confirmed the unusual welcoming arrangement to reporters. The meeting marks a formal state visit between the two leaders. Personally greeting a foreign dignitary at the airport is considered an uncommon diplomatic gesture for a sitting US president.

NYC Mayor Mamdani moves to regulate AI-generated images in rental listings

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has raised concerns about the use of artificial intelligence in online apartment listings. His administration is working on regulations that would require landlords to disclose when property images have been generated or altered by AI. The move comes in response to testimonies from renters who encountered misleading depictions of rental properties online. The proposed rules aim to ensure prospective tenants have access to accurate, unaltered visuals before making housing decisions. The broader goal is to curb deceptive advertising practices in New York City's rental market.

How a Unique Database Constraint Solves Duplicate Payments in Fintech Systems

A developer building a double-entry payments ledger on AWS EKS discovered that handling duplicate 'send money' requests was far harder than managing cloud infrastructure. A naive check-then-insert approach in Python appeared safe but contained a concurrency window where two simultaneous retries could both pass the duplicate check and trigger double debits. The real fix came from a single database-level UNIQUE constraint on the idempotency key, combined with a Postgres ON CONFLICT clause, making deduplication atomic at the storage layer rather than relying on application logic. An ElastiCache layer was added for performance, but only as a cache written after database commit, ensuring Redis failures affect latency rather than financial correctness. The key lesson: sequential tests cannot expose this class of bug, making concurrency-aware design and database-enforced constraints essential in payment systems.