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•11mo 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•11mo 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.

FanDuel wants to carve a sports niche in the prediction market business

https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/19/tech/fanduel-prediction-markets-app
1•1659447091•1m ago•0 comments

"You're mad Lad figured it out " – OpenClaw creator [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rzYDM6vMtI
1•0xAntonioo•3m ago•0 comments

String Seed of Thought: Prompting for Distribution-Faithful, Diverse Generation

https://pub.sakana.ai/ssot/
1•hardmaru•3m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Palmier – bridge your AI agents and your phone

https://github.com/caihongxu/palmier
1•caihongxu•5m ago•0 comments

pnpm v11 is almost here

https://twitter.com/pnpmjs/status/2045901598006690244
1•bpierre•7m ago•0 comments

Futuristic analyser tool? – what is this – omg

https://rogmash.neocities.org/3drein
1•rogmash•9m ago•0 comments

KMDS, now with natural language ingestion and search

https://github.com/rajivsam/kmds
1•rsva•16m ago•1 comments

Amazon behind on jobs promised for funding to build Virginia headquarters

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2026/04/20/amazon-h2q-virginia-headquarters/
1•reaperducer•18m ago•0 comments

Digital Ecosystems: Interactive Multi-Agent Neural Cellular Automata

https://pub.sakana.ai/digital-ecosystem/
2•hardmaru•19m ago•0 comments

A Pragmatic Approach to Thorny People Problems

https://witnesstodestruction.blogspot.com/p/a-pragmatic-approach-to-thorny-people.html
1•basilikum•21m ago•0 comments

San Francisco Solved Metro Vandalism with One Neat Trick

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/04/fare-gate-society-bart/686868/
2•mmcclure•24m ago•0 comments

KV Cache Compression 900000x Beyond TurboQuant and Per-Vector Shannon Limit

https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.15356
5•EGreg•25m ago•0 comments

Technological Phylogenetics: Modeling Tech Evolution Like Git (Paper)

https://zenodo.org/records/19673425
1•xsytrance•30m ago•1 comments

What Does a VPN Protect You From

https://anonymous-proxies.net/posts/what-does-a-vpn-protect-you-from/
1•sabrinacarpen•30m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Real-time visualization of Claude Code agent orchestration

https://github.com/patoles/agent-flow
1•daco•31m ago•0 comments

Show HN: NeuG – High-performance Embedded graph DB, one line to serve

1•robeenly•33m ago•0 comments

Front End Is Edge Computing

https://edge.jmaleonard.com/01-frontend-is-edge-computing.html
1•jmaleonard•33m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Weekly Log, Old-school journaling social media

1•bobbies-treats•34m ago•0 comments

Bad Matrix Reloaded

https://flandrew.srht.site/listful/bad-matrix-reloaded.html
1•adityaathalye•36m ago•0 comments

How the Heck Does Shazam Work?

https://perthirtysix.com/how-the-heck-does-shazam-work
5•thunderbong•41m ago•1 comments

Mruby 4.0.0 Released

https://mruby.org/releases/2026/04/20/mruby-4.0.0-released.html
2•rguiscard•48m ago•0 comments

FreeBSD CVE-2026-4747 Log Suggests Mythos Is a Marketing Trick

https://www.flyingpenguin.com/freebsd-cve-2026-4747-log-suggests-mythos-is-a-marketing-trick/
3•jgalt212•49m ago•0 comments

Prediction markets are breaking the news and becoming their own beat

https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/04/prediction-markets-are-breaking-the-news-and-becoming-their-own...
2•gnabgib•50m ago•0 comments

Computational Models of Interoception and Body Regulation(2021)

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0166223620302204
1•rolph•53m ago•0 comments

Qwen3.6-35B-A3B speculative decoding is net-negative on RTX 3090

https://github.com/thc1006/qwen3.6-speculative-decoding-rtx3090
4•thc1006•54m ago•1 comments

The US and Europe are still stronger together

https://www.ft.com/content/e4c9ee6e-5db5-436f-9b14-a625b9a77145
1•petethomas•54m ago•0 comments

David Rumsey Map Collection

https://www.davidrumsey.com/
2•alschwalm•57m ago•0 comments

Russian economy is faltering despite oil windfall, Sweden warns

https://www.ft.com/content/04a9d05d-2502-44d4-b7e0-041aaa4f83cd
6•doener•1h ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Has AWS Support fallen off?

1•frenchtoast8•1h ago•2 comments

I built loan software after my spreadsheets diverged into chaos

https://lendsolo.com/
1•psidereas•1h ago•0 comments