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.

The Rise of Marketing Speak

https://sustainableviews.substack.com/p/the-rise-of-marketing-speak
1•rzk•31s ago•0 comments

Break Bricks on Any Webpage

https://github.com/canalun/brick-break-anywhere
1•indigodaddy•32s ago•0 comments

The Mystery in the Medicine Cabinet

https://asteriskmag.com/issues/14/the-mystery-in-the-medicine-cabinet
1•downsplat•1m ago•1 comments

SEC's Power to Force Fraudsters to Disgorge Gains Returns to U.S. Supreme Court

https://www.law.com/nationallawjournal/2026/04/16/secs-power-to-force-fraudsters-to-disgorge-gain...
1•1vuio0pswjnm7•3m ago•0 comments

Doom with LaTex

https://julienlargetpiet.tech/articles/dissecting-latex-revenge-four-years-later.html
1•random__duck•4m ago•0 comments

Netflix Chair Reed Hastings to Leave Board in June

https://www.wsj.com/business/media/netflix-chair-reed-hastings-to-leave-board-in-june-6d887c27
1•fortran77•7m ago•1 comments

Sekreets – Real-Time Scanning of Leaked AI API Keys on GitHub

https://sekreets.vercel.app/
2•certyfreak•10m ago•0 comments

Startup Wars: How George Lucas Produced Star Wars Like a Startup

https://bertolami.com/blog/startup-wars
1•specular•10m ago•0 comments

SFML 3.1 Is Released

https://github.com/SFML/SFML/releases/tag/3.1.0
1•eXpl0it3r•10m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Opus 4.7 – is anyone measuring the real token cost on agentic tasks?

1•nicola_alessi•12m ago•0 comments

Show HN: The Public Tab – See every federal dollar flowing through your district

https://thepublictab.com/
1•jaaacckz•12m ago•2 comments

Ask HN: Agent orchestrators / UIs you use on top of Claude?

1•nyellin•12m ago•0 comments

Why Engineering Managers shouldn't be expected to code

https://dev.jimgrey.net/2026/03/25/the-player-coach-trap-why-engineering-managers-shouldnt-be-exp...
1•saeedesmaili•13m ago•0 comments

Perplexity Personal Computer

https://www.perplexity.ai/hub/blog/personal-computer-is-here
1•Yukonv•15m ago•0 comments

Artificial Intelligence Index Report [pdf]

https://hai.stanford.edu/assets/files/ai_index_report_2026.pdf
1•danielmorozoff•15m ago•0 comments

Show HN I made my vacation rental bookable by AI agents–no Airbnb, 0% commission

https://hemmabo-mcp-server.vercel.app/.well-known/mcp.json
1•Freezone•16m ago•2 comments

Electron 41 Released

https://www.electronjs.org/blog/electron-41-0
2•andrewstetsenko•16m ago•0 comments

The Pandaverse

https://www.theremingoat.com/blog/the-pandaverse
1•ecliptik•17m ago•0 comments

Sir-Bench – benchmark for security incident response agents

https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.12040
3•dan_l2•17m ago•2 comments

Single-agent AI coding is a nightmare for engineers

https://twitter.com/MilksandMatcha/status/2044863551186309460
1•sarahxc•17m ago•0 comments

How to make your one-on-ones more productive

https://effortbox.com/blog/how-to-make-your-one-on-one-more-productive/
1•andreylangovoy•17m ago•0 comments

Who's paying for tokens and why? (The Anthropic 1000)

https://www.robinsloan.com/lab/ai-spend/
2•speckx•21m ago•1 comments

Finding a duplicated item in an array of N integers in the range 1 to N − 1

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20260413-00/?p=112227
1•ibobev•21m ago•0 comments

Our new AI code policy: No AI

https://screenshotbot.io/blog/no-ai
2•kitallis•21m ago•0 comments

Show HN: AI compatibility without compromises

https://supercompat.com
1•Nedomas•22m ago•0 comments

GOP finalizing draft national privacy law that would preempt states

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/04/16/gop-national-privacy-law-technology-00876794
2•Cider9986•23m ago•0 comments

Modular Monolith: dependencies and communication between Modules

https://binaryigor.com/modular-monolith-dependencies-and-communication.html
1•PaulHoule•25m ago•0 comments

Mechanisms of introspective awareness in LLMs [pdf]

https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.21396
1•ryeights•26m ago•0 comments

Simple Made Easy – Rich Hickey (2011) [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxdOUGdseq4
2•adityaathalye•26m ago•0 comments

How much return are you giving up by caring what's in your portfolio?

https://stevenmackey.substack.com/p/how-much-return-are-you-giving-up
1•chibg10•27m ago•0 comments