frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

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

1•dave2299•1y 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•1y 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.

Skills MCP

1•gengirish•1m ago•0 comments

Resurrecting an old hack for building UI in GitHub READMEs

https://blog.jse.li/posts/markdown/
1•eat_veggies•1m ago•0 comments

Google Maps Now Shows 'Lake America' Instead of Lake Ontario

https://www.wired.com/story/google-maps-now-shows-lake-america-instead-of-lake-ontario/
1•khazhoux•2m ago•0 comments

Running SQLite Apps on Docker and Kubernetes with Litestream

https://openrun.dev/blog/litestream/
2•ajayvk•3m ago•1 comments

Going Founder Mode on Cancer – By Elliot Hershberg

https://centuryofbio.com/p/sid
1•vinnyglennon•4m ago•0 comments

Substantial under-detection of human rabies cases in the United States

https://www.nature.com/articles/s44528-026-00031-4
1•bucket2015•5m ago•0 comments

How to work remotely from France: the 2026 visa guide for digital nomads

https://www.foxapply.com/blog/en/work-remotely-from-france-digital-nomad-visa-guide
1•josanjohnata•6m ago•0 comments

Claude Skill – sourced research on how 5 social apps work

https://github.com/elchrysaki/social-app-teardown
1•elchrysaki•6m ago•0 comments

4000-Series Integrated Circuits

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4000-series_integrated_circuits
2•peter_d_sherman•7m ago•0 comments

Pyramid Replacement

https://intelligence-curse.ai/pyramid/
1•miletus•8m ago•0 comments

USDA cyclospora research projects shelved amid funding cuts and relocations

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/08/30/usda-cyclospora-research-projects-01055989
1•cocacola1•8m ago•0 comments

Flock's CEO Is Lying to Cops About 404 Media's Reporting on Abortion Case

https://www.404media.co/flocks-ceo-is-lying-to-cops-about-404-medias-reporting-on-abortion-case/
3•MinorTom•9m ago•1 comments

Pimacs – An Emacs UI for Pi

https://ananthakumaran.in/2026/08/30/pimacs.html
2•ananthakumaran•11m ago•0 comments

Should we laugh more at ourselves? It's complicated

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260828-laughing-at-ourselves-can-be-good-for-us-heres-how-to...
1•tigerlily•13m ago•0 comments

Redesigning the Inference Chip

https://zartbot.github.io/blog/arch/jalapeno/en.html
1•__patchbit__•13m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Randomly Sample Locations on Streets

https://github.com/geosensing/geo-sampling
1•neehao•14m ago•0 comments

Cross-class friendships are strong predictors of upward mobility

https://www.ft.com/content/ce3139ac-e88e-4c0d-ab92-b36e79052836
1•marojejian•18m ago•1 comments

Should We Have Kept the American Empire?

https://www.maximum-progress.com/p/should-we-have-kept-the-american
3•vinnyglennon•18m ago•0 comments

Ancient 'Who owns Linux?' case now has one foot deep in the grave

https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/08/24/ancient-who-owns-linux-case-now-has-one-foot-very...
1•Tomte•20m ago•0 comments

Monetizing the Golden Age of Short Selling

https://www.alphanume-research.com/p/monetizing-the-golden-age-of-short
1•alphanume•28m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Flint – A C/C++ build system and package manager written in pure C

https://github.com/mainak55512/flint
1•mbhatt99•30m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Tinysandbox-JS-Runtime - JS in WASM in v8

https://github.com/danthegoodman1/tinysandbox/tree/main/tinysandbox-js-runtime
1•dangoodmanUT•30m ago•0 comments

Seattle light rail became first floating passenger train

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/how-seattle-light-rail-became-worlds-fir...
1•k-ian•31m ago•0 comments

Coyote vs. Acme (also, for free, my take on The Odyssey)

https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/08/30/coyote-vs-acme-also-for-free-my-take-on-the-ody...
1•Tomte•32m ago•0 comments

The baffling science of SSRIs: how do they work?

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-02570-w
1•cwwc•33m ago•0 comments

Who Are We Now?

https://jessitron.com/2026/08/30/who-are-we-now/
2•ingve•34m ago•1 comments

Reward Guided Speculative Decoding

https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.04118
1•E-Reverance•35m ago•0 comments

'They shot all their weapons; they trashed their ships; they ran out of money'

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/27/trump-iran-war-navy-budget
16•cwwc•36m ago•0 comments

Revise, a zero code, desktop ML platform, revolutionizing ML model creation

https://www.revise.live/
2•Aadi_Ajmire•36m ago•0 comments

Show HN: AbracadaNames – a multilingual, data-driven wall of first names

https://abracadanames.com/
1•PopFlamingo•38m ago•0 comments