Bruce Dawson

  1. Reflections on My Tech Career – Part 2

    This is second and final part of the story of how my career as a software developer unfolded (part 1 is here). In this half I work at four different companies in the Seattle area, make my mark, and then … Continue reading →

    Published

  2. Reflections on My Tech Career – Part 1

    I’ve been lucky enough to have had a successful career as a software developer. Spanning six companies and thirty-seven years I’ve had the opportunity to work on Elastic Reality, Xbox, Windows, Steam, Internet Explorer, dozens of games, and Chrome, and … Continue reading →

    Published

  3. Finding a VS Code Memory Leak

    In 2021 I found a huge memory leak in VS code, totalling around 64 GB when I first saw it, but with no actual limit on how high it could go. I found this leak despite two obstacles that should … Continue reading →

    Published

  4. Acronis True Image Costs Performance When Not Used

    Over two years ago I installed Acronis True Image for Crucial in order to migrate my data to a new SSD I had just purchased. It worked. I then left True Image installed “just in case”, and what harm could … Continue reading →

    Published

  5. Google Maps Doesn’t Know How Street Addresses Work

    (or actually they do, but they don’t use this knowledge effectively) Update, April 26, 2025: the address fix for W 6th Ave is live, mostly. Going forward I wish that Google Maps would make it harder to get bad data … Continue reading →

    Published

  6. What this blog is about

    I’ve recently told a few people that I write, that I have a blog, and then I try to describe what I write about. I’m kinda proud of some of the stuff that I’ve covered here on randomascii over the … Continue reading →

    Published

  7. Find me on bsky

    I used to really enjoy the other microblogging site but it became too much of a democracy-destroying disinformation hell site so I haven’t been there in a long time. I’ve moved to bsky – I’m https://bsky.app/profile/randomascii.bsky.social. Follow me there for … Continue reading →

    Published

  8. Life, death, and retirement

    I haven’t been blogging much lately, and it turns out there is a very good reason. My last technical blog post was October 1st of last year. After I hit publish on that one I went to get ready for … Continue reading →

    Published

  9. Localization Failure: Temperature is Hard

    The Guardian is one of my favorite news sources. I’m a subscriber (support news organizations!) and I read it daily. But it is not immune to errors, as this headline shows: 68 °F above average is a lot. For a … Continue reading →

    Published

  10. 32 MiB Working Sets on a 64 GiB machine

    Memory is a relatively scarce resource on many consumer computers, so a feature to limit how much memory a process uses seems like a good idea, and Microsoft did indeed implement such a feature. However: They didn’t document this (!) … Continue reading →

    Published