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.

LLM Web Search Benchmarks: More Searches Beat a Better Search Engine

https://openrouter.ai/blog/announcements/web-search-benchmark/
1•DGAP•1m ago•0 comments

Earn yield through machine learning vault on DeFi

https://twitter.com/macbrennan_cc/status/2088295071024034226
1•panterafii•3m ago•1 comments

150 years of Gibbs' phase rule

https://www.chemistryworld.com/features/150-years-of-gibbs-phase-rule/4023900.article
1•akshatjiwan•4m ago•0 comments

Predicting short interest from FINRA daily short volume shows 0.414 correlation

https://equibles.com/research/does-daily-short-volume-predict-short-interest
1•daniel3303•4m ago•0 comments

An advanced attacker is targeting Salesforce and ServiceNow instances worldwide

https://www.reco.ai/blog/city-forum-campaign-salesforce-servicenow
1•daretograsp•5m ago•0 comments

The database that should be dead but runs the Internet [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CB_Aa2ODeM
1•teleforce•6m ago•0 comments

US Court rules AFP health programs can't import Gilead medications from overseas

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/14/court-ruling-gilead-medications-overseas-afps.html
1•ck2•7m ago•1 comments

Agentic AI drops digits, This library catches them before it runs in fintech

https://github.com/insightitsGit/PrismManifest
1•parvaamin•8m ago•0 comments

Desktop Calendar: A Design Journey – The Thunderbird Blog

https://blog.thunderbird.net/2026/08/desktop-calendar-a-design-journey/
1•speckx•9m ago•0 comments

Visual Studio Code 1.133

https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_133
1•tosh•11m ago•0 comments

Nvidia's $500B Plan Envelops Wall Sreett in Its AI Frenzy

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-14/nvidia-s-500-billion-plan-envelops-wall-street...
1•petethomas•11m ago•0 comments

Quantum Latin squares cannot solve Euler's 36 officers problem

https://phys.org/news/2026-08-quantum-latin-squares-euler-officers.html
1•sciences44•12m ago•0 comments

Map: Tracking OpenAI's Leadership Exodus

https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/map-tracking-openais-leadership-exodus-231728875.html
2•yogthos•15m ago•0 comments

The Workplace Works as Designed. That's the Problem

https://participate.sxsw.com/flow/sxsw/sxsw27/community-voting-sxsw/page/community-voting/session...
1•mooreds•16m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Has anyone been fired because of an AI-driven DDoS attack?

3•novateg•16m ago•0 comments

Asus PureGo Fruit and Vegetable Cleanliness Detector

https://www.asus.com/us/networking-iot-servers/smart-home/smart-kitchen/purego-pd100/
2•Bluestein•18m ago•0 comments

The Foothills of Bay Area House Party

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-foothills-of-bay-area-house-party
1•paulpauper•18m ago•0 comments

How to Keep Thinking

https://www.seangoedecke.com/how-to-keep-thinking/
1•inferhaven•18m ago•1 comments

Don't Worry About Scratching Your iPhone Camera Lenses

https://daringfireball.net/2026/08/iphone_camera_lens_scratch_resistance
1•Tomte•18m ago•0 comments

Flu vaccine shown to increase infections

https://www.foxnews.com/health/flu-vaccine-linked-higher-infections-says-early-research
1•bilsbie•19m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Where can I find small programmer communities?

1•NotParth11•19m ago•1 comments

Training AI Scientists to Replicate Research

https://inherentlabs.ai/research/training-to-replicate
2•pixelmoth•20m ago•0 comments

Regulated Markets Are Slow to Handle Change

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/08/regulated-markets-are-slow-to-handle-ch...
1•paulpauper•21m ago•0 comments

Adding to the Barrel of Finance Fallacies

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/08/shooting-fish-in-a-barrel.html
1•paulpauper•21m ago•0 comments

CFPB to Stop Posting Customer Narratives on Complaint Database

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/banking-law/cfpb-to-stop-posting-customer-narratives-on-complaint-d...
2•petethomas•22m ago•0 comments

Clicks Communicator and Power Keyboard

https://www.clicks.tech/
1•amai•22m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Easel – Interactive review boards for agent feedback loops

https://github.com/The-Sentience-Company/easel
1•Aazen•26m ago•0 comments

Lisa's Copy (and Cut, and Paste)

https://unsung.aresluna.org/deeper-dive-lisas-copy-and-cut-and-paste/
2•arbesman•26m ago•0 comments

DeepSeek Paper: A Programming Paradigm for Spatiotemporal Composability [pdf]

https://github.com/cordiverse/paper/blob/main/paper.pdf
1•gr_norm•27m ago•0 comments

The Deadlock Empire

https://deadlockempire.github.io/
2•gregsadetsky•29m ago•0 comments