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.

Claude Is Down, Again

https://status.claude.com/incidents/1y63m9yzpjn2
1•imalerba•22s ago•0 comments

Quick–swap your avatar to purple, green, or a mix of both

https://purplepfp.com
1•BruceWok•1m ago•0 comments

LLMs have me feeling heavy

https://old.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/1p5xtud/llms_have_me_feeling_heavy/
1•bundie•4m ago•0 comments

Shai-Hulud 2.0 Supply Chain Attack: 25K+ Repos Exposing Secrets

https://www.wiz.io/blog/shai-hulud-2-0-ongoing-supply-chain-attack
2•samuel246•6m ago•0 comments

Neoteny

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoteny
2•nomilk•11m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Who is building the next gyroscope app integrated with AI?

1•HipstaJules•13m ago•0 comments

Nvidia's 'I'm Not Enron' memo has people asking a lot of questions

https://www.theverge.com/business/828047/nvidia-enron-conspiracy-accounting
3•greg_V•13m ago•1 comments

Ai2 Dolma: 3T token open corpus for language model pretraining (2023)

https://allenai.org/blog/dolma-3-trillion-tokens-open-llm-corpus-9a0ff4b8da64
1•tosh•13m ago•0 comments

Implementing dependent types: how hard could it be? (Part 1)

https://jerrington.me/posts/2025-05-23-depty-impl.html
1•fanf2•13m ago•0 comments

We ask Valve the big questions around the Steam Machine, Frame and Controller

https://youtu.be/yvu66Y2VLq8
1•doener•18m ago•0 comments

Google is starting to bridge OpenAI's product moat with Gemini's "dynamic view"

https://spyglass.org/gemini-vs-chatgpt-product/
1•cesidio•19m ago•1 comments

Git 3.0 Retires Master: What Developers Need to Know

https://jsdevspace.substack.com/p/git-30-finally-retires-master-what
1•javatuts•20m ago•1 comments

Americans are holding onto devices longer than ever and it's costing the economy

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/23/how-device-hoarding-by-americans-is-costing-economy.html
1•taubek•24m ago•0 comments

A Proposal for Simplified, Modern Definitions of "Object" and "Object Oriented"

https://web.archive.org/web/20140804162018/http://wcook.blogspot.com/2012/07/proposal-for-simplif...
1•signa11•25m ago•0 comments

Introducing F# (F Sharp) 10

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/introducing-fsharp-10/
1•keyle•25m ago•0 comments

Alice the Caml – new build system for OCaml

https://www.alicecaml.org/
1•keyle•25m ago•0 comments

We removed the τ2-bench airline eval because Opus 4.5 was too clever

https://twitter.com/alexalbert__/status/1993068200121213222
2•stared•30m ago•0 comments

Breaking AI Context Silos: A Proposal for a Portable Memory Protocol (PMX)

1•sravanth_thota•31m ago•0 comments

Having Fun with K&R C

https://sbaziotis.com/compilers/having-fun-with-k-and-r-c.html
1•thunderbong•32m ago•0 comments

PGH Transit Atlas

https://rzrizaldy.github.io/pgh-transit-atlas/
1•altilunium•34m ago•0 comments

A Practical Framework for Measuring Impact of AI Coding Assistants

https://www.oobeya.io/blog/ai-measurement-framework
1•emredu•35m ago•0 comments

Show HN: I built the literal Duolingo Killer

https://kanjieight.vercel.app/
8•Mikecraft•37m ago•8 comments

Google Leapfrogged Rivals with New Gemini Rollout

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/google-gemini-3-ai-behind-scenes-e1787729
2•tzury•39m ago•0 comments

Vdu_controls – a DDC control panel for monitors

https://github.com/digitaltrails/vdu_controls
2•anewhnaccount2•40m ago•0 comments

NSan: A Floating-Point Numerical Sanitizer

https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.12782
1•anewhnaccount2•40m ago•0 comments

Aussies sell their tech company to US giant for $5B

https://www.afr.com/technology/aussies-sell-their-tech-company-to-us-giant-for-5b-20251124-p5nhv7
1•iamtech•40m ago•0 comments

Unu.ran – Universal Non-Uniform RANdom Number Generators

https://statmath.wu.ac.at/unuran/doc/unuran.html
1•anewhnaccount2•40m ago•0 comments

Introvert – The AI Dating Co-Pilot Launches on Geyser Fund Today

https://geyser.fund/project/introvert
1•shegby•42m ago•1 comments

Michael Burry's Substack

https://michaeljburry.substack.com/
3•mihau•44m ago•0 comments

Jony Ive and Sam Altman say they have an AI hardware prototype

https://www.theverge.com/news/827607/openai-hardware-prototype-chatgpt-jony-ive-sam-altman
3•signa11•44m ago•0 comments