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.

AI's transformation of mathematics is a turning point for science

https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2026/10/12/ais-transformation-of-mathematics-is-...
1•bookofjoe•4m ago•1 comments

Modernizing the Console with Kmscon

https://fedoramagazine.org/modernizing-the-console-with-kmscon/
2•voxadam•5m ago•0 comments

Russian Satellite Makes a Menacing Approach to Another Craft in Orbit

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/19/science/russian-satellite-makes-a-menacing-approach-to-another...
1•donohoe•7m ago•0 comments

OVH Cloud CLI Tool Hacked by Russian Threat Actors

https://opensourcemalware.com/blog/glassworm-hacks-ovh-clouds-cli-tool
1•6mile•9m ago•0 comments

HQL – Run typed queries directly inside Markdown

https://github.com/ewiger/hql
1•divingstar•10m ago•0 comments

“bonsoir, Elliot”: How abliterated models can get you pwned

https://projectdiscovery.io/research/how-abliterated-models-can-get-you-pwned
2•chatmasta•10m ago•0 comments

Drawing Sound – Daphne Oram Workshop and App

https://signalfunctionset.com/projects/oramics-workshop/
2•stuart78•12m ago•0 comments

Show HN: MediationBench – testing AI mediators in 62 simulated conflicts

https://mediationbench.com/
1•hendler•12m ago•0 comments

Tokenade is now Open Source

https://github.com/pi-infected/tokenade
1•nethalo•13m ago•0 comments

Is it too late to reduce catastrophic AI risk?

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2026/10/is-it-already-too-late-to-reduce-catastrophic-ai-r...
1•DeepLogin•14m ago•0 comments

Weak Links Start to Show in A.I. Borrowing

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/17/business/ai-debt-coreweave-oracle-softbank.html
2•cdrnsf•14m ago•0 comments

Native Linux Builder for Determinate Nix is now generally available

https://determinate.systems/blog/native-linux-builder-ga/
1•biggestlou•15m ago•0 comments

Sketch-a-Series: Timestral interactive demo

https://huggingface.co/spaces/townbox/sketch-a-series
1•7777777phil•21m ago•0 comments

GridFTP: A Brief History of Fast File Transfer (2024)

https://www.globus.org/blog/gridftp-a-brief-history-of-fast-file-transfer
2•QuantumNomad_•25m ago•0 comments

Texas Said It Would Halt Data Center Permits. The State Is Pushing Ahead Anyway

https://www.404media.co/it-aint-right-texas-said-it-would-halt-data-center-permits-the-state-is-p...
1•cdrnsf•27m ago•1 comments

Why AI is not conscious and perhaps never will be

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-03313-7
2•ersinesen•27m ago•0 comments

The Labor Market for Recent College Graduates

https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:explore:outcomes-by-major
3•birdculture•29m ago•0 comments

Advancing Coding in Low-Resource Programming Languages

https://openai.com/index/low-resource-programming-languages/
1•tech234a•30m ago•0 comments

Software Will Eat Software (2020)

https://www.readmargins.com/p/software-will-eat-software-in-a-remote
1•dzonga•32m ago•0 comments

Blocking Identity Resolution Infrastructure

https://webkit.org/blog/18438/blocking-identity-resolution-infrastructure/
1•wondersky•35m ago•0 comments

Dayfly Mail – Free temporary inbox with selectable lifetime (10M to 3D)

https://dayfly.email/en
1•xianye•37m ago•0 comments

Tell HN: PagerDuty incident causing repeated alerts/escalations

https://status.pagerduty.com/posts/details/PX0PUSQ
1•gtirloni•38m ago•1 comments

Who Verifies the Agents?

https://commentary.dev/blog/who-verifies-the-agents
1•Bootstrapper909•39m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Spacebar – Preview .sqlite3, .geojson, .ipynb and more in the Finder

https://spacebar.greg.technology/
1•gregsadetsky•41m ago•0 comments

Japanese players liken Tekken rollback mod to serious crimes, playerbase split

https://www.ign.com/articles/japanese-tekken-players-are-likening-tekken-6s-rollback-netcode-mod-...
2•anigbrowl•43m ago•0 comments

Elysia 2.0 RC: Rebuilding a JavaScript framework from scratch

https://next.elysiajs.com/blog/elysia-20-rc/
1•saltyaom2•44m ago•1 comments

PyTorch-native TPU back end for vLLM

https://github.com/vllm-project/vllm-torchtpu
1•zniturah•44m ago•0 comments

Profiling the Attack Surface of AI Agent Skills

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19264
1•ratneshiiita•45m ago•0 comments

Cronomonitor.com Is Now Live

https://cronomonitor.com
1•iambenc•46m ago•1 comments

Elias in the Lighthouse, Again? Diagnosing Low Diversity in LLM Stories

https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26492
2•gradus_ad•46m ago•0 comments