frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

How to get up to speed on software development from the top down

1•dave2299•7mo ago
Hi everyone, I am a non-technical founder. I’ve bootstrapped a tech-enabled services company over the past year that’s growing, profitable, and close to 15K a month in revenue. I, by nature, prefer to be involved in the weeds of what’s happening in each domain of my business at first, even if that results in slower business growth. I built my company with a white label portal software (Copilot.app), Airtable, Squarespace, AppSheet,and some ChatGPT scripts.

Now, I need to start building out custom tools. I want to take a deep dive into software development, starting with front and back end web development from the top down, rather than starting from the bottom up as a coder.

If I keep growing eventually I will end up bringing on technical employees, but I want to understand the lay of the land before I start down that road, and I found that I’m able to do a lot once I understand the domain using low code and no code tools. So for example, things like Retool, etc. will accomplish most of the next phase of building I need. But I want to have a reading list of 10 or 20 books or blogs or courses or podcast, etc.. That will help me start getting the way of the land on how to architect software.

I know basic python, basics of the building blocks of programming at the intro level. I just read Designing Data-Intensive Applications (2nd ed on O’Reilly). Does someone have a list of 10 modern books that would help me understand big picture topics like this?

Comments

sherdil2022•7mo ago
I offer personal / 1:1 training, mentoring and technical consultancy for founders and co-founders.

Please feel free to reach out to me. My throwaway email is in my profile, and I will respond.

Carving Nature at Your Joints

https://planktonvalhalla.com/20251219-carving-nature-at-your-joints/
1•mrcgnc•1m ago•0 comments

Chasing Your Tail

https://xania.org/202512/19-tail-call-optimisation
1•hasheddan•2m ago•0 comments

The AI Agents Roadmap Nobody Is Teaching You

https://www.decodingai.com/p/ai-agents-foundations-course
1•pauliusztin•3m ago•1 comments

Sleep Cots and Graham Crackers at Elon Musk's Child Care Program

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/18/technology/elon-musk-daycare-school.html
1•reaperducer•5m ago•0 comments

We Put an AI Vending Machine in Our Office. It Gave Away Everything [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpPhm7S9vsQ
1•lordleft•6m ago•0 comments

Show HN: We built a small app with my wife to track promises we do

https://lovechecks.app/
1•warkanlock•6m ago•0 comments

Engineers who dismiss AI

https://terriblesoftware.org/2025/12/19/the-strange-case-of-engineers-who-dismiss-ai/
6•matheusml•9m ago•1 comments

Build a Coding Agent from Scratch

https://thefocus.ai/reports/coding-agent/
1•combray•9m ago•0 comments

Don't stuff beans up your nose

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Don%27t_stuff_beans_up_your_nose
1•cyanf•10m ago•0 comments

Making a game on a custom bytecode VM in 7 days and 3kB

https://laurent.le-brun.eu/blog/making-a-game-on-a-custom-bytecode-vm-in-7-days-and-3kb
1•laurentlb•11m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Consulting-as-Code – A deterministic, neuro-symbolic agent architecture

https://vuduvations.github.io/Consulting-as-Code/
1•vuduvations•12m ago•1 comments

Pop _OS 24.04's New Scratch-Built Cosmic: Hands-On, with Screenshots

https://fossforce.com/2025/12/pop_os-24-04s-new-scratch-built-cosmic-hands-on-with-screenshots/
2•dxs•13m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Seen – x-platform/selfhosted/open-src photo and video solution

https://github.com/markrai/seen
1•markrai•13m ago•0 comments

Gunman in Brown University shooting found dead, linked to MIT killing

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/police-probe-links-between-brown-university-shooting-killing-mit...
2•andrepd•14m ago•0 comments

A Month of Chat-Oriented Programming with Claude

https://checkeagle.com/checklists/njr/a-month-of-chat-oriented-programming/
1•BafS•16m ago•0 comments

DHH Should Move Rails Off GitHub

https://cameronwestland.com/dhh-should-move-rails-off-github/
2•camwest•16m ago•0 comments

Show HN: BlazeDiff v2 – Fastest image diff with native binary and SIMD

https://github.com/teimurjan/blazediff
2•teimurjan•17m ago•0 comments

Is The Line dead? [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFVYgZMEOFg
1•camtarn•21m ago•1 comments

Curse of Dimensionality

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_dimensionality
2•cuechan•24m ago•0 comments

Show HN: RunMesh – OpenAI-first TypeScript framework for agentic applications

https://runmesh.llmbasedos.com/
1•iluxu•26m ago•0 comments

Show HN: LiteEvo – Let LLMs evolve their own playbook based on trial and error

https://github.com/wbopan/liteevo
1•mavoince•28m ago•0 comments

Always-on processor magic: how "Find My" works while iPhone is powered off

https://naehrdine.blogspot.com/2021/09/always-on-processor-magic-how-find-my.html
1•fanf2•30m ago•0 comments

EscapeBench: Towards Advancing Creative Intelligence Of Language Model Agents

https://aclanthology.org/2025.acl-long.39/
1•optimalsolver•32m ago•0 comments

US government sues US Virgin Islands & accuses officials of violating 2nd Amend.

https://apnews.com/article/usvi-us-government-trump-second-amendment-guns-45189a8a28da66b1307f4da...
2•sipofwater•34m ago•1 comments

DOMPurify, DOM-only, fast, Uber-tolerant XSS sanitizer for HTML, SVG and MathML

https://cure53.de/purify
1•handfuloflight•36m ago•0 comments

Vector Search for the Bible

https://searchyah.app/
2•quasibyte•36m ago•0 comments

Quake Deathmatch in the Browser via WebRTC

https://fte.triptohell.info/moodles/web/ftewebgl.html?+connect%20/hnews
1•klaussilveira•37m ago•0 comments

Americans Are Increasingly Convinced That Aliens Have Visited Earth

https://www.wired.com/story/americans-are-increasingly-convinced-that-aliens-have-visited-earth/
3•BerislavLopac•39m ago•3 comments

When Scope Lies: The Wildcard Pattern Drop Footgun in Rust

https://obeli.sk/blog/when-scope-lies/
1•todsacerdoti•39m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Lilo Write – Local-first spatial writing (Apple Notes/whiteboard baby)

https://lilowrite.com
1•Lucavalentino•40m ago•1 comments