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•6mo 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•6mo 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.

The Bitter Lessons

https://www.hyperdimensional.co/p/the-bitter-lessons
1•gmays•10s ago•0 comments

Back to Basics: Let Denoising Generative Models Denoise

https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.13720
1•dvrp•44s ago•0 comments

Browser-based Lunatic Fringe Clone

https://jackinloadup.github.io/lunatic-fringe/
1•hoag•1m ago•0 comments

We Can Now Track Individual Monarch Butterflies

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/17/science/monarch-butterfly-migration-tracking-sensor.html
1•m463•1m ago•1 comments

The Fate of Data Model Dependency

https://medium.com/@HobokenDays/the-fate-of-shared-data-model-cf8a3dc88ac9
1•HideInNews•3m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Waitinglist.to – Let Founders Focus on Building

https://waitinglist.to/
1•ivanramos•4m ago•0 comments

The obvious economics of preserving the Amazon

https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2025/10/23/the-obvious-economics-of-preserving-the-amazon
1•gwintrob•8m ago•0 comments

Fuzzbox: Modern fuzzy finder for Vim with minimal dependencies

https://github.com/vim-fuzzbox/fuzzbox.vim
1•inatreecrown2•9m ago•1 comments

AA-Omniscience: Evaluating Cross-Domain Knowledge Reliability in Language Models

https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.13029
4•declanjackson•11m ago•0 comments

The End of Traditional Industrial Design and Transition into a New Frontier (2021) [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fozZfnJCoaE
1•mgh2•11m ago•0 comments

Migrate from Ingress-Nginx Controller to Nginx Ingress Controller

https://docs.nginx.com/nginx-ingress-controller/install/migrate-ingress-nginx/
1•mooreds•12m ago•0 comments

The productivity impact of coding agents

https://cursor.com/blog/productivity
2•todsacerdoti•13m ago•0 comments

SimpleMMO – How I made a hole a home (2021)

https://blog.galahadcreative.com/simplemmo-how-i-made-a-hole-a-home/
1•bdlowery•18m ago•0 comments

Count Cachula – Local-first performance without the complexity

https://countcachula.spooky.click/
1•jakelazaroff•18m ago•0 comments

My Tesla Robotaxi "safety" driver fell asleep

https://old.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/1p00wmx/my_tesla_robotaxi_safety_driver_fell_asleep/
1•leoh•24m ago•0 comments

Seekdb,unified search database for AI(relational, vector and full text)

https://github.com/oceanbase/seekdb
1•jinqueeny•25m ago•0 comments

So You Want To Look Rich? How to use museum archives to make large wall art

https://marykateandsmashley.substack.com/p/so-you-want-to-look-rich
2•novia•31m ago•1 comments

Microsoft's AI Strategy Deconstructed – From Energy to Tokens

https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/microsofts-ai-strategy-deconstructed
1•nsoonhui•32m ago•0 comments

Rank-balanced trees (2014) [pdf]

https://sidsen.azurewebsites.net/papers/rb-trees-talg.pdf
2•todsacerdoti•39m ago•0 comments

RDMA-Rust: Why another RDMA wrapper

https://rdma-rust.github.io/2025/11/16/why-another-rdma-wrapper/
2•wmf•40m ago•0 comments

PPP-over-HTTP/2: Having Fun with dumbproxy and pppd

https://snawoot.github.io/ppp-over-http2/
1•Snawoot•46m ago•0 comments

Salesforce no longer sells Slack directly in Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan

3•dt060•47m ago•0 comments

CoreWeave, the AI industry's ticking time bomb

https://www.niemanlab.org/reading/meet-coreweave-the-ai-industrys-ticking-time-bomb/
9•zerosizedweasle•49m ago•3 comments

A Theory of Dumb: Why Are IQ Scores Suddenly Falling?

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/american-adult-lower-iq-scores-cognitive-decline-technolo...
4•tysone•56m ago•0 comments

C23: A Slightly Better C

https://lemire.me/blog/2024/01/21/c23-a-slightly-better-c/
2•signa11•56m ago•0 comments

New rare earth crisis is brewing as yttrium shortages spread

https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/new-rare-earth-crisis-is-brewing-yttrium-short...
2•perihelions•58m ago•0 comments

The Life of a Packet in the Linux kernel: From write() to recv()

https://www.0xkato.xyz/life-of-a-packet-in-the-linux-kernel/
1•signa11•59m ago•0 comments

Show HN: A Claude Code plugin for build agent (dogfodding it now)

https://github.com/openonion/connectonion-claude-plugin
1•OpenOnion•1h ago•0 comments

Mexican government partially unblocks secure internet

https://blog.torproject.org/mexican-government-partially-unblocks-tor/
3•iamnothere•1h ago•0 comments

OpenZFS 2.4 Squeezes in Some Last Minute Improvements

https://www.phoronix.com/news/OpenZFS-2.4-rc4-Released
3•Bender•1h ago•0 comments