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•10mo 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•10mo 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.

Open source Claude Code swarms WTF

https://github.com/m0at/hermes-lite
1•sfffs•2m ago•1 comments

Work Life Balance in Japan's Tech Industry

https://japan-dev.com/blog/work-life-balance-in-the-japanese-tech-industry
1•etdev•4m ago•0 comments

Rust Bibliography

https://rustc-dev-guide.rust-lang.org/appendix/bibliography.html#rust-bibliography
1•vinhnx•5m ago•0 comments

Checking Write Bandwidth on GPUs

https://clamtech.org/?dest=gpuwrite
1•matt_d•5m ago•0 comments

Rectified Flow Auto Coder

https://world-snapshot.github.io/RAC/
1•E-Reverance•6m ago•1 comments

Servo is almost ready for Cordova, but there are two missing pieces

https://blog.merzlabs.com/posts/cordova-servo/
1•Fudgel•9m ago•0 comments

Model Collapse

https://aksioma.org/model-collapse
1•jruohonen•12m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Pmc – tiny single binary for packing code into LLM context

https://github.com/Water-Run/pack-my-code
3•linxxxx•12m ago•1 comments

I Asked My AI About Israel-Iran. It Tried to Intercept a Satellite

https://github.com/fredabila/orcbot
2•abilafredkb•13m ago•4 comments

Show HN: A high-performance, privacy-focused normal map generator in the browser

https://normalmap-generator.online/
1•maxnew•13m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Raglet(open-source)–portable RAG for small text corpora (no infra)

https://github.com/mkarots/raglet
1•cepstrum9•17m ago•1 comments

Seedance 2.0 Pro – Next-Gen AI Video Generator by ByteDance

https://www.seedance2pro.com
2•AgarwalKamrul•17m ago•2 comments

Paris: Causally Consistent Transactions with Partial Replication

https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.09327
1•Kinrany•17m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Transcribe audio from apps, files and your device's microphone

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dstudio.d_transcriber&hl=en
1•dstudios•18m ago•0 comments

Laws of UX

https://lawsofux.com/
1•celadevra_•18m ago•0 comments

Challenges in Decompilation and Reverse Engineering of CUDA-Based Kernels [pdf]

https://nicolo.dev/files/pdf/reverse26-cuda-kernels.pdf
1•matt_d•19m ago•0 comments

Tesla opens its first Megacharger station to Semi customers in California

https://electrek.co/2026/03/08/tesla-opens-first-megacharger-ontario-california-semi-customers/
2•mattas•19m ago•0 comments

Alabama set to execute man who didn't kill anyone

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/alabama-set-execute-man-not-kill-anyone-rcna262113
3•Jimmc414•20m ago•1 comments

Uber turned off $25M a year on Facebook Ads

https://read.earlystagegrowth.com/p/brand-marketing-at-uber-taught-me
1•joshlachkovic•20m ago•0 comments

WTI Crude over $100 a barrel after Iran US War Tensions refuse to calm

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c79542n0grwo
2•cermicelli•22m ago•0 comments

Coding agents wrote a chess engine in pure TeX

https://blog.mathieuacher.com/TeXCCChessEngine/
2•azhenley•25m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: If a photo of you could talk and move with your voice in calls, why not?

1•BelVisgarra•26m ago•0 comments

(AI) Smells on Medium

https://rmoff.net/2025/11/25/ai-smells-on-medium/
4•jruohonen•30m ago•2 comments

The uncomfortable truth about hybrid vehicles

https://www.theverge.com/column/890135/truth-hybrid-vehicles
1•kstonekuan•30m ago•0 comments

Comprehensive Benchmarking of Agentic Systems Across 104 Real-World Challenges

https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02586
1•wek•35m ago•0 comments

A blog post by Anthropic about COBOL wiped $30B off IBM's market cap

https://www.heraldsun.com/news/business/article314892640.html
1•toss1•35m ago•1 comments

Loongson 3B6000: Compared to AMD Zen 5, Intel Arrow Lake and Raspberry Pi 5

https://www.phoronix.com/review/loongson-3b6000-loongarch
1•rguiscard•42m ago•1 comments

Building for Trillions of Agents

https://twitter.com/levie/status/2030714592238956960
1•rmason•43m ago•0 comments

GNU and the AI Reimplementations – <Antirez>

https://antirez.com/news/162
4•abdelhousni•44m ago•0 comments

Claude helped select targets for Iran strikes, possibly including school

https://twitter.com/robertwrighter/status/2030482402628214841
7•delichon•47m ago•4 comments