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•8mo 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•8mo 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.

Betterment Hacked by Crypto Scam

https://bsky.app/profile/ericrie.se/post/3mbzlov44sc23
1•EricRiese•1m ago•1 comments

Every Developer Abandoned This Product in 3 Minutes

https://tessakriesel.com/every-developer-abandoned-this-product-in-3-minutes/
1•mooreds•2m ago•0 comments

Apartments to be built above Costco's

https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/hundreds-of-apartments-are-being-built-on-top-of-a-cos...
1•nateb2022•2m ago•0 comments

General Relativity is declared empirically refuted

https://zenodo.org/records/18202791
1•byeinstein•6m ago•1 comments

Collection and Use of Biometrics by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/11/03/2025-19747/collection-and-use-of-biometrics-...
1•hentrep•6m ago•0 comments

Tell HN: Increased Number of Incidents on GitHub Between Nov 2025 and Jan 2026

https://www.githubstatus.com/history
1•stefankuehnel•7m ago•0 comments

PoC Wayland compositor rendering graphics into terminal

https://github.com/pshirshov/brain-damage
1•pshirshov•9m ago•1 comments

AI solves Erdos problem #728 (Terence Tao mathstodon post)

https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/115855840223258103
2•cod1r•18m ago•0 comments

U.S. Hiring Turned Sluggish over First Year of Trump's Second Term

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/09/us/politics/us-hiring-economy-trump-second-term.html
5•duxup•18m ago•1 comments

Building a Raytracer from Scratch in Go

https://github.com/ikarishinji9/riot
1•ikarishinji9•18m ago•0 comments

Stored Procedures Considered Harmful

https://pouyamiri.com/blog/stored-procedures-considered-harmful
1•p0u4a•19m ago•0 comments

First 12 Minutes of MTV [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVrEzH9gkZk
1•MilnerRoute•20m ago•0 comments

Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai are cowards

https://www.theverge.com/policy/859902/apple-google-run-by-cowards
13•mdhb•26m ago•3 comments

Pre-Commit Lint Checks: Vibe Coding's Kryptonite

https://www.getseer.dev/blogs/pre-commit-linting-vibe-coding
1•akshay326•27m ago•1 comments

Turso: The Next Evolution of SQLite

https://github.com/tursodatabase/turso
1•nateb2022•28m ago•0 comments

The Future of Stack Overflow

https://waspdev.com/articles/2026-01-09/the-future-of-stack-overflow
1•senfiaj•35m ago•0 comments

America is falling out of love with pizza

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/america-is-falling-out-of-love-with-pizza/ar-AA1Tziyh
1•jnord•36m ago•1 comments

The Abstraction Trap: Why Layers Are Lobotomizing Your Model

2•blas0•37m ago•0 comments

Tell HN: X changed its Iran flag emoji

3•michaeltimo•37m ago•1 comments

Italy Fines Cloudflare for Refusing to Filter Pirate Sites on Public 1.1.1.1 DNS

https://torrentfreak.com/italy-fines-cloudflare-e14-million-for-refusing-to-filter-pirate-sites-o...
3•jnord•37m ago•0 comments

Start your meetings at 5 minutes past

https://philipotoole.com/start-your-meetings-at-5-minutes-past/
1•otoolep•38m ago•0 comments

Nano-VLLM

https://huggingface.co/blog/zamal/introduction-to-nano-vllm
1•zansara•39m ago•0 comments

A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages

http://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-mostly-wrong.html
2•piinbinary•39m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Vect AI– Replace your marketing agency with autonomous agents

https://vect.pro/
3•MMAFRAZ•40m ago•1 comments

Show HN: I built an app that blocks social media until you read Quran daily

3•kalyfacloud•40m ago•0 comments

'Money mule' cases surge as criminals target young people on social media

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2025/dec/22/money-mule-cases-surge-as-criminals-target-young-pe...
3•PaulHoule•43m ago•0 comments

Personal Websites with a /now Page

https://nownownow.com/
2•susam•43m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: What useful skills can be learned through rote memorization?

1•blev•44m ago•1 comments

Mini SGLang

https://github.com/sgl-project/mini-sglang
1•zansara•45m ago•0 comments

Genetic inheritance for animals in Dwarf Fortress

https://old.reddit.com/r/dwarffortress/comments/1q8bagk/does_size_matter_lets_breed_colossal_rabb...
1•danso•45m ago•0 comments