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.

Ask HN: B2B or B2C?

1•eyalhadad•47s ago•0 comments

The Slow Death of Productivity: Why Time.sleep() Is Killing Your Automation

https://pypi.org/project/nano-wait/
1•LuizSeabra•2m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Collecting AI Developer Tools

https://aihunt.dev/
1•fullofdev•2m ago•0 comments

Proposal: Generic Methods for Go

https://github.com/golang/go/issues/77273
1•pansa2•3m ago•0 comments

'Organized syndicates' fraudulently access health records, lawsuit says

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2026/01/22/electronic-health-record-fraud-lawsuit/
1•bookofjoe•3m ago•1 comments

JWT authentication bypass in HarbourJwt via "unknown alg"

https://pentesterlab.com/blog/cve-2026-23993-harbourjwt-unknown-alg-jwt-bypass
1•mooreds•6m ago•0 comments

Justice Department Opens Criminal Probe into Silicon Valley Spy Allegations

https://www.wsj.com/us-news/law/justice-department-opens-criminal-probe-into-silicon-valley-spy-a...
1•nradov•7m ago•0 comments

Results from the 2025 Go Developer Survey

https://go.dev/blog/survey2025
2•mooreds•8m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Skill Generator – Turn terminal workflows into AI agent skills

1•ezulabs•8m ago•0 comments

A multi-entry CFG design conundrum

https://bernsteinbear.com/blog/multiple-entry/
1•ibobev•9m ago•0 comments

Infinite Random Rectangles – The Poisson Rect Process

https://www.boristhebrave.com/2026/01/22/infinite-random-rectangles-the-poisson-rect-process/
1•ibobev•9m ago•0 comments

Mana LLM OS

https://www.mana.space/
1•behzadhaghgoo•11m ago•0 comments

EV battery leader CATL set to launch first sodium-ion batteries in vehicles

https://electrek.co/2026/01/23/ev-battery-leader-plans-first-sodium-ion-batteries-passenger-cars/
2•breve•11m ago•0 comments

The Time Oxygen Almost Killed Everything [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qERdL8uHSgI
2•mooreds•12m ago•0 comments

Zulip AI use policy and guidelines

https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/contributing/contributing.html#ai-use-policy-and-guidelines
1•Philpax•13m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Why don't winter gloves have mechanical fingers?

2•amichail•15m ago•2 comments

Show HN: The one-stop-place for gen-alpha events

https://www.bloxrn.com
1•claude_sh_1959•15m ago•0 comments

The New "Full Stack"

https://twitter.com/ray_daze/status/2014813876878262301
2•alexjray•16m ago•0 comments

EquipmentShare (YC W15) goes public

https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/congratulations-to-equipmentshare/
5•subsequent•16m ago•2 comments

Show HN: Free Top Font Library: Bestfonts.co – Find Free Top Fonts in Seconds

https://bestfonts.co
1•LetsBuildThis•16m ago•0 comments

Tim O'Reilly – AI and the Next Economy

https://www.oreilly.com/radar/ai-and-the-next-economy/
1•rmason•17m ago•1 comments

Tiny Sand Grains May Solve 5k-Year-Old Stonehenge Mystery

https://studyfinds.org/sand-may-solve-stonehenge-mystery/
1•rmason•18m ago•0 comments

Show HN: CIE – Open-source code intelligence engine for AI coding assistants

https://github.com/kraklabs/cie
1•kraklabs•18m ago•0 comments

Urjo

https://urjo.com/
3•wawayanda•19m ago•0 comments

Breath carries clues to gut microbiome health

https://medicine.washu.edu/news/breath-carries-clues-to-gut-microbiome-health/
1•gmays•20m ago•0 comments

Wine 11.1 – Run Windows Applications on Linux, BSD, Solaris and macOS

https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/releases/wine-11.1
2•neustradamus•20m ago•0 comments

Winapp, the Windows App Development CLI – Windows Developer Blog

https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2026/01/22/announcing-winapp-the-windows-app-developme...
1•MaysonL•22m ago•0 comments

North America divided into regions of 1M people

https://www.anita.garden/assets/na1m.png
3•owodc•24m ago•0 comments

Akin to believing light beer is a solution to alcoholism: My time at Patagonia

https://arestlesstransplant.substack.com/p/akin-to-believing-light-beer-is-a
1•chaseadam17•26m ago•0 comments

AI is poisoning itself and pushing LLMs toward collapse,but there's a cure

https://www.zdnet.com/article/ai-is-poisoning-itself-model-collapse-cure/
1•CrankyBear•30m ago•0 comments