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•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.

We Need Vat and UBI

https://wilsoniumite.com/2026/06/07/we-need-vat-and-ubi/
1•Wilsoniumite•2m ago•0 comments

Beware Management Consultants

https://about.iceland.co.uk/our-story/the-dark-ages/beware-management-consultants/
1•mellosouls•11m ago•0 comments

Eternal Software Initiative

https://eternal-software.org/
1•eigenhombre•12m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Create and Maintain Filesystem Structures for LLMs [v1.0.11 Out]

https://pypi.org/project/seed-cli/
1•hunterx•14m ago•0 comments

Birth rates are declining in most of the world—here's why it really matters

https://phys.org/news/2026-06-birth-declining-world.html
2•rustoo•15m ago•0 comments

Government to buy AI chips to stop tech companies fleeing Britain

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2026/06/07/government-buy-ai-chips-stop-tech-companies-fleeing/
2•graemep•17m ago•0 comments

Show HN: pypoLCA – Latent Class Analysis and Regression in Python

https://github.com/marcandre259/pypolca
2•marcandre259•18m ago•1 comments

Google just made you a search quality rater. You won't get paid

https://mojodojo.io/blog/google-just-made-you-a-search-quality-rater-you-won-t-get-paid
5•zenincognito•20m ago•0 comments

Is grep better than a vector DB?

https://www.zansara.dev/posts/2026-03-15-vector-dbs-vs-grep/
1•shahargl•20m ago•0 comments

Show HN: TeamOlimpo: Handoffs and mandatory SOPs for multi-agent coordination

https://github.com/teamolimpo/TeamOlimpo
1•tensor_mill•23m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Every Claw Deserves a Face

https://nyxclaw.ai/
2•antonios_makro•24m ago•1 comments

Finland Tests Early-Warning System Detecting Threats to Subsea Cables

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-05/finland-tests-early-warning-system-detecting-t...
4•giuliomagnifico•25m ago•0 comments

The User Doesn't Care – But you should

https://lewiscampbell.tech/blog/260607.html
2•kugurerdem•28m ago•0 comments

Mru: A Fault-Tolerant Operating System for Thousand-Year Autonomous Operation

https://zenodo.org/records/20579438
1•wbnns•29m ago•0 comments

The best relationships are all-encompassing.

https://andys.blog/the-best-relationships/
1•andytratt•30m ago•0 comments

Reinventing Entropy – Compression and Intelligence Part 1 (3b1B) [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6DKRf-fAAM
2•vismit2000•31m ago•0 comments

Show HN: We built a tool to dub any video in the original voice in 40 languages

https://vaani.media
3•ABSALOMMAXY•34m ago•1 comments

Trump to announce nearly $700M in coal support

https://www.axios.com/2026/06/04/trump-coal-federal-support-announcement
1•doener•34m ago•0 comments

ModPageSpeed 2.0: Lighthouse 56 to 90. On your own servers

https://modpagespeed.com/
2•ksec•36m ago•0 comments

Firefox confirms working on own adblocker [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qd5_5hXa8Zc
4•HelloUsername•39m ago•2 comments

The Grate Cheese Robbery

https://longreads.com/2026/05/28/the-cheese-theft-food-crime/
1•RickJWagner•39m ago•0 comments

Free security agent on GitHub AgentHQ, scans PRs and auto-fixes vulns

https://github.com/marketplace/bright-security-agent
1•bararchy•40m ago•1 comments

Walkthrough at the drone defence company Sensofusion [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIMVmYzARiE
1•mikkohypponen•41m ago•1 comments

Open Semantic Interchange: The Universal Standard for Semantic Data

http://open-semantic-interchange.org/
1•asplake•41m ago•0 comments

Discover Your Destiny with AI Palm Reading

https://aipalmreading.net/
1•tunzhang•41m ago•0 comments

Stack Overflow didn't just help AI learn to code

https://zozo123.github.io/how-stackoverflow-taught-ai/
1•zozo123-IB•45m ago•0 comments

The brain can unlock true multitasking after intensive training

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-06-brain-true-multitasking-intensive.html
2•pseudolus•50m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Version Control for AI Agents

https://cognatoai.com
1•harsh020•53m ago•0 comments

Show HN: PWNC – A dependency-free web platform I've been building for 25 years

https://github.com/heydev-de/pwnc
1•katzito•54m ago•1 comments

AI needs shame, not taste

https://www.jacquescorbytuech.com/writing/ai-needs-shame-not-taste
1•iamacyborg•57m ago•0 comments