Monday, 23rd September 2013
What are the pro and cons of outsourcing the coding of an SaaS tool?
Pros: if you can afford it and are completely incapable of hiring an in-house development team, it will get a version of your software built.
[... 153 words]Are you less likely to be accepted to Y Combinator if you don’t know how to make money yet?
If you apply and say “we have no idea how we will make money” you are much less likely to be accepted than if you say “we’re not 100% sure how we will make money, but our initial thoughts are to try X”.
[... 156 words]Is there a maximum number of records one can fetch with a MySQL query?
To my knowledge there is no upper limit—that’s why good database libraries provide abstractions that let you iterate over large queries without loading the entire result set in to memory at once.
[... 54 words]What is a good, simple SaaS tool for testing SOAP calls?
I doubt you’ll find one. The words “Simple” and “SOAP” don’t deserve to appear in the same sentence, and SOAP is massively unfashionable these days (for good reason) so you’re unlikely to find any modern SaaS companies developing tools for it.
[... 58 words]Why doesn’t Quora open-source its search interface?
See my answer to Simon Willison’s answer to How come Quora hasn’t contributed any significant open source tools?
[... 32 words]What is “Software-as-a-Service”?
Software which is hosted for you by the providing company, so you don’t need to install and manage it on your own servers.
[... 44 words]