Technical books using https://learning.oreilly.com/home/. I have been a subscriber for more than 10 years, dicontinued for a few years and resumed about a year ago.

Also use Amazon Kindle, Google Play books if I can't find the book on Safari.

There are lots of good resources as mentioned by others. Here are some starting points.

Start with a list of ideas - These ideas should be solutions of problems either you face or you see others face - Find 10 people you can talk to about your solution and make a list of features - Pick the core ones and build a functional prototype that people can use and give feedback

Start with a problem (space) - Look for problems that people complain about or ask questions (an analysis of Ask HN is a good source to start with)

Here is one story I read today (I think I found it on HN!)

https://www.linen.dev/s/linen-community/t/545988/from-idea-t...

Wish you all the best. You already took a good first step by asking a question here.

Some companies do provide a technical track in which you can become a Principal Engineer with no management responsibility. But if you have experience in solving problems, you may be good as a mentor/coach to other devs.

The longer term solution to this problem may be technical consulting.

There is a technical track at my company and I'm fairly high on the IC track. I took a fairly good sized pay cut when I stepped back to IC, which I was completely fine with in exchanged for the type of work. The mentoring is one of the few things I like about managing, but there's so much other downside to my quality of life and my technical skills just suffer.

Blockly is an example of no-code app that generates code. It is a good starting point to understand how you can build a no code framework. Blockly is...

https://developers.google.com/blockly

High level concepts

1. A workspace 2. A set of pre-defined componets that map to functions or statements 3. A way to connect components to back-ends (like spreadsheets or database columns) 4. Some semantics(behavior) for connections. 5. An implied or explicit sequence of interactions between components.

Great.

Can you decouple it from VSCode so that we can use it with other editors like Vi or Emacs?

I struggle with PKM. Stuff is distributed on Google Drive, Github wiki and a few tools like Obsidian.

"find your first 1-10 paying customers yourself". I agree with this. Going through this will show you whether your product is really ready for the market and customers perceive enough value to pay for it. This part cannot be outsourced. This is the founding teams job and is as important as creating a product (sometimes even more important).

Like it. It will be a great teaching aid (to start with).

What do we get by joining the mailing list?

The current search engine has very limited context (your profile and the sites you visited and the searches you have done).

What if the next incremental improvement is asking you questions about the search to get better context before actually doing the search and giving you a smaller set of usable results?

Just dreaming :)

Build a simple functional prototype (also known as Minimum viable product) and give it away free.

This will start a whole series of next level tasks and some of them you may not even be aware of with just an idea.

Track usage and interest in your prototype and decide whether it is worth building the full product.

"Give it away free" is one thing that most of the times gives false results.

I completely agree with this. If a product is meant to be free then give it away if you intend on charging some day you need top get people to pay from the start. Even if its a small amount.

Also if users will pay for a buggy prototype then it is clearly something they really want.

Check out https://www.meetup.com/Code-for-San-Francisco-Civic-Hack-Nig...

Find one similar in your region. If it does not exist, start one.

Coming up with an idea for a product that is useful and that people will pay for is more difficult than actually implementing one.

Ah yes, with a good idea, the rest is just "a simple matter of implementation."

Look at YCombinator startups, most fail to come up with a product that people will actually pay money for.

This proves that bad ideas exist, not that the idea is the most important or difficult part.

Maybe it was the right product, but the implementation was shoddy. We'll never know.