Part 2 is up:
https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2025/11/10/reflections-on-...
Readit Newsbrucedawson commented on Reflections on My Tech Career – Part 1 randomascii.wordpress.com... · Posted by u/breppp
brucedawson commented on Finding a VS Code Memory Leak randomascii.wordpress.com... · Posted by u/brucedawson
In 2021 I found an invisible memory leak in a tool (VS Code) that I have never used. This is the story of how.
brucedawson commented on Acronis True Image costs performance when not used randomascii.wordpress.com... · Posted by u/juanviera23
but they shared symbols for the tishell64 DLL to help us understand what was going on.
This is perhaps the most surprising sentence in this article. A proprietary software company sharing debugging symbols (which are basically the closest thing to source code that isn't source code) when you just ask their support about an issue is something that I'd never expect to happen.
I was surprised also when this happened, but pleased. The trust was nice. The fact that they needed to give me the symbols in order to understand the issue was surprising. Why couldn't they find the calls in their source? Or analyze the trace themselves? Curious.
To be clear though, that isn't his second law, at least as of two months ago, according to https://bsky.app/profile/randomascii.bsky.social/post/3lk4c6...
Should it be my second law?
https://bsky.app/profile/randomascii.bsky.social/post/3lr24s...
brucedawson commented on Street address errors in Google Maps randomascii.wordpress.com... · Posted by u/brucedawson
> that’s 1.5 miles or 123 furlongs
Surely that's a typo and supposed to be 12.3 furlongs? Even that might be slightly incorrect.
Whoops! Good catch. That was supposed to be 12 furlongs. Apparently I have no intuitive sense of how long a furlong is so I didn't notice my typo
brucedawson commented on Street address errors in Google Maps randomascii.wordpress.com... · Posted by u/brucedawson
And another one I just thought of: If I ask for driving directions to a mall or office building (here in Singapore, anyway), it nearly always sends me to the taxi drop-off, not the entrance to the carpark. I have to drop a pin on the carpark entrance (which presumes that I know where it is) to get sane directions. Otherwise, I end up on the wrong side of the building in gridlocked traffic trying to find the carpark.
That is a problem they haven't tried to solve. Driving directions could be for tax/ride-share or a person in their own car. If Google Maps doesn't even ask you which it is then it can't possibly reliably give you correct directions. I'd love to see that fixed.
brucedawson commented on Street address errors in Google Maps randomascii.wordpress.com... · Posted by u/brucedawson
> I believe that there is no accepted global system for "how street addresses work", but there has to be a better solution then a business owner reaching out to a friend's cousin to try to get a serious problem fixed.
The friend's cousin did what they could have done themselves, use the feedback tool.
Right. I (the friend's cousin) did that. And two weeks after the changes were supposed to take effect the directions are still broken and the customers of this business are still inconvenienced.
So I wrote a blog post. It is yet to be determined if that will help or not.
Given that Google Maps understands the rules for street addresses in Vancouver it seems like the problem shouldn't have happened in the first place and should have been auto-corrected and the fix should have been quickly accepted. But none of that happened.
Most non-nerds don't know how to use the feedback tool. That is the reality.
brucedawson commented on Street address errors in Google Maps randomascii.wordpress.com... · Posted by u/brucedawson
I've noticed that Google maps now tries sometimes to incorporate building entrances into walking directions. I wonder if misplaced building entrances may be part of the explanation.
It drives me crazy that Google Maps sometimes asks me where the entrance to a building is but it never seems to be clear about what it is asking. Where a pedestrian would enter? Where a car would enter?
Driving directions are a wonderful thing but they need to account for whether you are arriving in a ride-share vehicle (please drop me at the front entrance) or in a car you need to park (the front entrance may be worthless) - lots of work yet to be done.