Random ASCII
Bruce Dawson — Retired software engineer, 37-year industry veteran
Bruce Dawson (37-year industry veteran) on performance, debugging, and Windows internals.
randomascii.wordpress.comSo many of my blog posts start this way. "This doesn't look right", or "huh — that's weird", or some variation on that theme.
Bruce Dawson spent 37 years in the software industry and now writes some of the most satisfying detective stories on the internet — except the mysteries are invisible memory leaks, broken Windows performance, and bugs in software you use every day. His posts follow a consistent pattern: notice something weird, investigate obsessively, and explain everything he finds along the way.
Written by Bruce Dawson.
Infrequent
Publishes sporadically
7
Independent Blog
English
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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 retire. Cavedog/Humongous Entertainment – 1997 to 2002 In 1997 my wife and I got annoyed with being so far from family (we were in Wisconsin, they were mostly in British Columbia) and we wanted to move to the west coast. This time I did a proper job search, talking to at least four companie...
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 create a blog whose investigative reporting and ETW tutorial articles have been read over five million times. I was recently explaining to a friend how I got my start in this industry and I decided that I should write it down, if only to clarify i...
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 have made the discovery impossible: The memory leak didn’t show up in Task Manager – there was no process whose memory consumption was increasing. I had never used VS Code. In fact, I have still never used it. So how did this work? How did I find an invisible memory leak in a tool that I h...
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 that possibly cause. Well, funny you should ask. I recently noticed that whenever I plugged or unplugged my external monitor Explorer.exe would consume a lot of CPU time – dozens of seconds of it. It was enough CPU time to make my computer noticeably sluggish until things calmed down which coul...
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 into maps, I wish they would respond to feedback faster, and I wish they would make their estimates for when changes go live more accurate (two weeks versus 24 hours). I was driving around Vernon, BC a few weeks ago and I asked Google Maps for directions to 3207 30th Ave. It confide...
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If you've ever stared at a performance problem and wondered where to even start, Bruce's blog is a masterclass in noticing what others miss — and following the thread until you find the answer.