TIL (Today I Learned) - various important things for Software Development

1. When resetting a whole column on a relational database table, dropping/adding the column might be better than running an UPDATE. In my case, I had to update two columns to NULL from a table with 35 million rows.
2. OAuth 1. I had to support a third party to use our REST service that uses OAuth 1.0a. In only a couple of days, I had to learn how this spec works and write up the details needed by the 3rd party to write a client. I'm glad that today there's plenty of resources for this complicated spec; I can imagine that this would be very troublesome to understand in the past. At least a former colleague had a lot of issues when he worked with Facebook OAuth in the past. This blog post really helped me out in quickly understanding OAuth.
3. Monitor HTTP traffic of java programs via Fiddler. With networking setups, it is often easier said than done. By experience, I knew I would be in trouble with how to setup the SSL certs, force java to to use a proxy server, etc. Surprisingly, this is actually easy to do. I use this guide and was able to set it up in 5 mins!