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.

DeepSeek and Moonshot were quietly relaying customer prompts to Claude

https://twitter.com/IntCyberDigest/status/2098149671957103005
1•thewavelength•1m ago•1 comments

LLM Visualizer – Build a Transformer from Scratch

https://jayvisaria.github.io/LLM-Visualizer/#/dashboard
2•evo_9•11m ago•0 comments

What Comes After Git

https://ersc.io/blog/what-comes-after-git
3•tangled•13m ago•0 comments

The collapse of complex software (2022)

https://nolanlawson.com/2022/06/09/the-collapse-of-complex-software/
1•airhangerf15•16m ago•0 comments

DHH Omarchy Doctrine: Fascism Stage One by Definition

https://www.flyingpenguin.com/dhh-omarchy-doctrine-fascism-stage-one-by-definition/
5•jamesgill•23m ago•2 comments

Navier Stokes

1•Lifelogger•24m ago•0 comments

Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record

https://archive.org/details/vanishing-culture-2026
1•colinprince•24m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Family Greenhouse – shared plant care for a household

https://familygreenhouse.net/
1•ChelseaKR•25m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Algo-Trading-Skills – trading failure modes AI agents don't know

https://github.com/HimanshuJ16/Algo-Trading-Skills
2•HimanshuJ16•25m ago•0 comments

Physicist does the math on Star Trek's "Picard maneuver"

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/09/physicist-does-the-math-on-star-treks-picard-maneuver/
3•quantified•28m ago•0 comments

FDA Clears Bionic Pancreas for People with Type 1 Diabetes

https://www.bu.edu/articles/2023/fda-clears-bionic-pancreas-for-type-1-diabetes/
1•daniel_iversen•39m ago•1 comments

Orbit: 217 Ns/token CPU memory query, 236.9 vs. 317.1 ppl on WikiText-2 [pdf]

https://github.com/torakagemusha-sudo/torafirma-systems/blob/main/orbit/ORBIT_Public_Benchmark_Re...
1•thomastorafirma•39m ago•0 comments

RWK – A Text Mmorpg Still Active Since 2001

https://rwk1.racewarkingdoms.com/
2•Caarticles•40m ago•1 comments

DoD cyber strategy aims for 'something big, something muscular' in offensive ops

https://breakingdefense.com/2026/09/dod-cyber-strategy-aims-for-something-big-something-muscular-...
2•nosmokewhereiam•41m ago•2 comments

SAGG – failover gateway for cheap LLM providers

https://api.privatedeskai.com/benchmarks
1•koroleva_labs•47m ago•0 comments

Genome Duplication Is an Evolutionary Gamble

https://www.quantamagazine.org/genome-duplication-is-a-radical-evolutionary-gamble-20260902/
2•gumby•48m ago•0 comments

Show HN: OpenMuse – an Open Source alternative to Meta's personal agent

https://github.com/diggerhq/openmuse/
1•iacguy•49m ago•0 comments

Anthropic Staffers Again Sound the Alarm on AI Catastrophe

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/09/anthropic-ai-risks-coxon-amodei-openai-cybersecurity...
3•signa11•52m ago•0 comments

OpenAI's Bubeck denies trying to cut Anthropic mathematician from credit

https://thenextweb.com/news/bubeck-navier-stokes-account-apology-altman
2•htk•53m ago•0 comments

T-Mobile to Charge $5 a Month for iOS 27 iPhone Handoff

https://www.macrumors.com/2026/09/10/ios-27-iphone-handoff-cost/
7•seemaze•53m ago•5 comments

Review a pull request by booting it

https://fzakaria.com/2026/09/09/review-a-pull-request-by-booting-it
1•lalitmaganti•54m ago•0 comments

Let's Encrypt Outage

https://letsencrypt.status.io/pages/incident/55957a99e800baa4470002da/6aa35c1d892d7304f2747e01
1•takoid•55m ago•0 comments

Watermarks Without Verification: AI Text Watermarking After the EU AI Act

https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.09604
1•sbulaev•56m ago•0 comments

'Not selling my soul': Why this Aussie maths professor took on OpenAI

https://www.afr.com/world/north-america/not-selling-my-soul-why-this-aussie-maths-professor-took-...
3•Alien1Being•59m ago•0 comments

Tesla Autopilot was on in I-35 crash that killed its driver

https://electrek.co/2026/09/10/tesla-driver-assist-i35-guardrail-pattonsburg/
2•jijojv•1h ago•2 comments

Show HN: Kern Agent – See inside your agent's brain

https://github.com/oguzbilgic/kern-ai
1•obilgic•1h ago•0 comments

Try GPT-6 Astra for a few bucks

https://trylatestmodel.com/
2•Guustaaf•1h ago•1 comments

Hired to Code, He Built Hudson River Trading and a $27B Fortune

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2026-09-10/how-jason-carroll-built-hudson-river-trading-a...
5•aanet•1h ago•1 comments

Vivaldi 8.2 for mobile: the browser. Your rules. Your extensions

https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-on-mobile-8-2/
4•thunderbong•1h ago•0 comments

A mini-game around fake news

https://unspin.hidden-pond-5e6a.workers.dev/
4•azermite•1h ago•0 comments