Growth · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Swimming in Tech Debt
This is the first half of my book, “Swimming in Tech Debt”. It is available at a pre-launch sale price of $0.99 (https://loufranco.com/tech-debt-book). I have been working on it since January 2024. It is based on some posts in my blog, but expands on my ideas quite a bit. In September 2024, excerpts appeared in Gergely Orosz’s Pragmatic Engineer newsletter, which helped me get a lot of feedback that expanded the book from my initial idea. This half is about what I expected to do before that —- the rest of the book goes into team and CTO practices.
Swimming in Tech Debt is the first half of a book exploring technical debt in software development. Written for developers and technical leaders, it covers foundational concepts and what to expect before diving into… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
- 1IW
Hey folks. Last year I was fortunate enough to sign a deal to write a book with my favorite technical publisher, The Pragmatic Bookshelf. When I started out as an Engineering Manager many years ago, I found that there wasn't a huge amount of material that specifically and practically helped me understand how to do my job. When you learn to program there's all of these amazing tutorials, examples and guides, but what was there for new managers? In response to this, a couple of years ago I started a blog over at https://www.theengineeringmanager.com which got a decent amount of…
2020 · its alternatives →
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Tapflow 2.0▲1,125We built Tapflow for devs, designers, PMs, and tech folks who’ve been sitting on internal docs, templates, and systems — but never productized them. Upload a PDF, notes, or workshop deck, and Tapflow drafts a structured product (with chapters, teaser and pricing plans). It’s good for AI kits, onboarding guides, design systems, and frameworks. You can sell through Stripe, LemonSqueezy, or PayPal. Real-time collaboration is in early beta. No site builder, no LMS — clean design and just focused tools to ship. Fully bootstrapped and just launched on PH today →…
2025 · tapflow.ai · its alternatives →
- 3IQ
Quick background: I used to code. Studied it in school, wrote some projects, but eventually convinced myself I wasn't cut out for it. Too slow, too many bugs, imposter syndrome — the usual story. So I pivoted, ended up as an investment associate at an early-stage angel fund, and haven't written real code in years. Fast forward to now. I'm a Buffett nerd — big believer in compound interest as a mental model for life. I run compound interest calculations constantly. Not because I need to, but because watching numbers grow over 30-40 years keeps me patient when markets get wild. It's basically…
Jan 2026 · calquio.com · its alternatives →
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Hey HN, I just wanted to share that after five months of intense work and countless caffeine-fueled writing sessions, "Master Software Architecture: A Pragmatic Guide" is now available. Writing this book was a crazy time. I entirely focused on it, and it took exactly 753 hours of writing, editing, and image editing & resizing(!) until the premiere. Yes, the last one (images) was a killer. If you ever think about writing a book, reserve a lot of time for it unless someone else does it for you. As a result, I am handing you the nearly 400-page book. It is a guide that will help you connect all…
2024 · leanpub.com · its alternatives →
- 5IW
Hey HN! I've been working on a book about WebAssembly over the last few months, and it's finally available at http://levelupwasm.com! Why a book on WebAssembly you ask? Well... WebAssembly is awesome (obviously ) but it's certainly not the easiest thing to learn. So I wrote this book as a practical intro to using WebAssembly in your web apps. I would appreciate any feedback!
2019 · its alternatives →
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After a four year journey, the book I wrote to help junior and mid-level programmers earn their first promotion was published today . The book is titled Junior to Senior: Career Advice for the Ambitious Programmer and is now available on Holloway’s website[0]. I truly believe that soft-skills are what makes the difference between a good programmer and a great one. I also believe that anyone can learn the soft-skills needed to accelerate their programming career. I wish I’d had better resources to learn these things in the early years of my career and I’m hoping this book will become a useful…
2022 · holloway.com · its alternatives →
- 7IW
The book page links to a blog post that explains how I got about it (and has a link to sample content), but the TL&DR is that I could not find a lot of books that were on "our" history _and_ were larded with technical details. So I set about writing one, and some five years later I'm happy to share the result. I think it's one of the few "computer history" books that has tons of code, but correct me if I'm wrong (I wrote this both to tell a story and to learn :-)). My favorite languages are Smalltalk and Lisp, but as an Emacs user, I've been using the latter for much longer and for my…
Feb 2026 · berksoft.ca · its alternatives →
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Ray▲293I've been using this daily for 4 months and figured others might find it useful. This is my first open source project so would love any feedback. Ray connects to your bank via Plaid, stores everything in an encrypted local SQLite database, and lets you ask questions about your finances in natural language. No cloud, no account, your data is stored on your machine. Before anything reaches the LLM, all PII is stripped — your name, companies, transaction details are redacted and replaced with tokens, then rehydrated locally in the response. The AI never sees who you are.
Apr 2026 · rayfinance.app · its alternatives →
- 9
The guide for building large, iOS, and Android native apps - with the challenges and common solutions across the industry.
2021 · mobileatscale.com · its alternatives →
- 10
An honest to god, non-algorithmic reverse chrono list of tech news that passes my signal-to-noise tests, updated hourly. A lightweight a page design as I've been able to keep; simple, clean, fast. No commercial features or aspirations - this is a passion project, something I've been fooling around with on and off for decades. There's a "Top" view too with an LLM edited front page & summary, and categorized views for a large number of topics - see the Directory. A few more buried features to explore, but the fundamental use case is pop in, scan, exit - fast and concise. Your feedback would be…
Oct 2025 · deadstack.net · its alternatives →
- 11
A useful short guide to software pricing
2016 · red-gate.com · its alternatives →
- 12IM
Hello. This year I dived into UI/UX area and at the same time I work as a web developer. I sincerely love making good UI. But at my full time job it's not always possible due to different reasons =\ So I've been posting random UI/UX staff on Twitter, then I made a free book that had 50 tips (posted it here as well). I decided to finish this year by collecting everything I learned and here it is: https://akcium.gumroad.com/l/ui-ux-tips. This time it's a paid one. But, you can check ~20 pages of it, just go to…
2021 · its alternatives →
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New book from the authors of Freakonomics
2015 · amazon.com · its alternatives →
- 15MT
2011 · pragprog.com · its alternatives →
- 16
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A very practical approach to equity splits.
2015 · barnesandnoble.com · its alternatives →
- 18IW
Hello HN, I spent my career writing software until about 7 years ago in which practically by accident I wound up in a technical sales role. Through determination and a lot of practice (2,000+ technical sales calls and counting) I managed to get pretty good at it, and along the way played a critical role in closing deals with Fortune 10 companies, Ivy league universities, non-profits, Federal government agencies, and many other organizations. At some point along the way I started compiling various notes and observations regarding what it takes to create a truly great technical sales…
2025 · its alternatives →
- 19
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Lend Academy▲64Teaching the world about peer to peer lending
2015 · lendacademy.com · its alternatives →
- 21
A tech debt reading and resources list - to help diagnose, prevent and control tech debt. - Hiberly/tech-debt-reading-list
2019 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 22MB
Hi, I spent the last year and a half writing a book on Docker and microservices, which was finally released on O'Reilly this week. "Using Docker: Developing and Deploying Software with Containers" takes a holistic approach, showing how containers can be used as the central artifact in a modern software development workflow. If anyone has any q's or feedback, please feel free to comment below. The book is available at: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920035671.do (use code AUTHD for a discount)…
2016 · its alternatives →
- 23MB
2020 · randallkanna.com · its alternatives →
- 24
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