iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Arthur Vickers @ajcvickers.bsky.social · 27/10/2025

My first blog post for MongoDB: Vector search with embeddings using EF Core against MongoDB. Super easy to get started, everything running free and locally for no hassle trying stuff out! #EFCore #MongoDB #dotnet dev.to/mongodb/mong...

dev.to

MongoDB Vector Search With EF Core

This post was written by Arthur Vickers, Staff Engineer at MongoDB The 8.3.3 and 9.0.3 releases of...

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Arthur Vickers @ajcvickers.bsky.social · 13/08/2025

Today I really got into the zone, coding for hours. It was beautiful. #coding

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Arthur Vickers @ajcvickers.bsky.social · 19/07/2025

Just joined 2.6% of players and completed Baldur's Gate III in Honour mode! #bg3

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Arthur Vickers @ajcvickers.bsky.social · 14/07/2025

DBNull is so right it's wrong.

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Arthur Vickers @ajcvickers.bsky.social · 14/07/2025

Current A.I. is like that really helpful friend...that you just can't trust. They will always answer your question whatever it is, and usually they give accurate information. But you can never really trust them, because when they don't know, they just make stuff up. 😆

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Arthur Vickers @ajcvickers.bsky.social · 01/07/2025

In April, I sowed some woodland wildflower seeds in a dark corner of the garden. They have been doing really well, and are now starting to bloom. Ten pounds well spent! #garden

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Arthur Vickers @ajcvickers.bsky.social · 30/06/2025

I'm proud to announce that today I start a new job at MongoDB as a staff engineer in the Database Experience team. Really excited to be working with a lot of great folks to make using MongoDB in your applications even better than it already is! #lifeatmongodb

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Arthur Vickers @ajcvickers.bsky.social · 29/06/2025

Here's the party doing all the heavy lifting in my Baldur's Gate honour run. Magic? What's that? Pfft; we just sneak up and hit things really hard! And if that don't work, we blow them up! #bg3

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Arthur Vickers @ajcvickers.bsky.social · 29/06/2025

Just starting Act 3 of Baldur's Gate III in honour mode with Piper: a deep gnome rogue4/monk6. Working really well. Str: 10 Dex: 23 Con: 14 Int: 17 Wis: 16 Cha: 12 AC: 21 Deception, persuasion, and intimidation all +9, so I don't fight unless I want to! #bg3

BG3 character sheet for a deep gnome rogue/monk

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Arthur Vickers @ajcvickers.bsky.social · 28/03/2025

Sunrise over the fens, from last weekend. #Fenlands #Norfolk

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Arthur Vickers @ajcvickers.bsky.social · 28/02/2025

We haven't been getting out enough, so yesterday we went to Cleethorpes. Lovely snowdrops in the Wolds, and then very cold on the seafront! Steels Corner House was the perfect cure for that. Then a drive by Franklin College and the Healing schools. Great mood booster! 💙

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Jeremy David Engels @jeremydavidengels.bsky.social · 21/02/2025

Good morning friends! Sending you all a big hug on this Friday morning. Today I will be trying to remember that even small acts of kindness and love matter—and to do a few.

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Nellie Cubed @nelnelnellie.bsky.social · 21/02/2025

Ann Patchett (author and bookstore owner at @parnassusbooks.bsky.social) recommends BEOWULF (translated by Seamus Heaney) as the book that will allow us to sleep at night and put the world into perspective. (This is from her “If You Haven’t Read It, It’s New to You” segment.) 📚💙

The author and bookstore owner stands in front of a shelf of book holding a copy of the book BEOWULF translated by Seamus Heaney.

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Arthur Vickers @ajcvickers.bsky.social · 20/02/2025

We have peacocks in the neighborhood. And now in the house too! #Lego #Peacocks

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Arthur Vickers @ajcvickers.bsky.social · 20/02/2025

First time on a racing sim and already better than me! (Okay, that's a very low bar, but still...)

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Arthur Vickers @ajcvickers.bsky.social · 19/02/2025

I guess I'm not putting my laundry away until later... #cats

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Arthur Vickers @ajcvickers.bsky.social · 19/02/2025

I also found a picture of my #Amiga 500, with GVP 52MB SCSI HD and 2MB fast RAM. There is also an AT-Once board in it, so I could boot into DOS and use WordPerfect! 🤣 🤣 (The ergonomics here suck, but it was the best I could do while renting a room as a neuroscience intern.)

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Arthur Vickers @ajcvickers.bsky.social · 19/02/2025

I found photographs that my mother took when I was a kid of my #Amiga screen with generated #Mandelbrot images. (We didn't have a printer, and certainly not a color one!) The quality isn't great, but it _is_ great to have a record of these! #Fractals

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Heath Stewart @heaths.dev · 19/02/2025

I'm excited to announce the first beta of our official #AzureSDK for #rustlang crates! This initial release includes Key Vault Secrets and Keys, Event Hubs including AMQP support, our core crates, and Identity. Cosmos is following soon. We have more planned including some usability improvements.

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Arthur Vickers @ajcvickers.bsky.social · 19/02/2025

I know I'm weird, but I love the coloring of the fur around Toast's eyes. #dogs

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Giorgi Dalakishvili @giorgi.dev · 19/02/2025

The MySQL query plan visualizer is going to be 🔥

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Kate North @curatorkate.bsky.social · 19/02/2025

The incredibly detailed late 19th century pulpit at Peterborough Cathedral 🤩 (Wider view in comment below)…

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Arthur Vickers @ajcvickers.bsky.social · 19/02/2025

I'm reading "The #Rust Programming Language". Ownership is interesting; it looks a lot like the guidelines I wrote for using smart pointers in C++. The Rust design is cleaner and more robust, but the fundamental approach is very similar. We had a lot of success with C++ used like this. But that… 1/2

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Arthur Vickers @ajcvickers.bsky.social · 14/02/2025

The finished, slightly wonky, cake. (Putting the frosting on is not my strong point! 🤣) #Baking

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Arthur Vickers @ajcvickers.bsky.social · 14/02/2025

Watching the peacocks in the neighborhood got me thinking about mating displays as correlated incentives. The goal is for the healthiest peacock to breed most. The hen is incentivized in this by the peacock's tail, because it was/is correlated with health. So, if the peacock can improve its… 1/4

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Arthur Vickers @ajcvickers.bsky.social · 14/02/2025

Adder in Thetford Forest last year.

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Arthur Vickers @ajcvickers.bsky.social · 14/02/2025

Making my wife an American yellow cake for Valentine's Day. Baking from scratch is the only way I have found to get a good yellow cake over here. And anyone who suggests a Victoria sponge cake instead can use that dry thing to mop up their spilled tea! 🤣🤣🤣 #Baking

British ingredients for an American yellow cake.

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Arthur Vickers @ajcvickers.bsky.social · 11/02/2025

Now listening to Live at Reading to get the blood flowing! #Nirvana #musicsky open.spotify.com/album/01Z1nu...

open.spotify.com

Live at Reading

Nirvana · Album · 2009 · 24 songs

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Arthur Vickers @ajcvickers.bsky.social · 11/02/2025

Just listened to "Nirvana MTV Unplugged". My favorite #Nirvana record, and that's saying a lot! Looking back, the song choice was inspired. The Meat Puppets rock. And my dad used to listen to Lead Belly, so that cover has always been special for me. #musicsky open.spotify.com/album/1To7kv...

open.spotify.com

MTV Unplugged In New York

Nirvana · Album · 1994 · 14 songs

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Arthur Vickers @ajcvickers.bsky.social · 09/02/2025

Still my favorite edition of Monopoly. But Mac can make it challenging! 🤣🐱💙 #Monopoly #MLP #cats

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Arthur Vickers @ajcvickers.bsky.social · 09/02/2025

Re-reading parts of NoSQL Distilled today. Still one of the best overviews of the fundamental problems associated with database scale out. Clearly written, short, and simple explanations. Despite the name, it cuts through the original NoSQL hype to the concepts underneath. #booksky #databases

NoSQL Distilled by Martin Fowler and Pramod J. Sadalage

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Dudley Dale @bletchleybark.bsky.social · 08/02/2025

I was not asked, and I do not approve

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Penny Short @penny-short.bsky.social · 07/02/2025

Lovely little jaunt up to Little Ingleborough today in the sunshine. Plan was to have lunch on Ingleborough but the wind really picked up to the point we decided to do the sensible thing and head back down. Yorkshire Dales looking splendid and it was great to visit Gaping Gill minus the winch 😊

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Wardsend Cemetery Heritage Park @wardsendcemetery.bsky.social · 08/02/2025

It's a cold and miserable day here in Sheffield but take heart. Spring is just around the corner. These photos are from the end of February 2023. On a South facing hillside on the banks of the Don the sun casts a beautiful light on our once forgotten cemetery.

Daffodils on the chapel site about to bloom.

The obelisk memorial on the chapel site remembers soldiers from nearby Hillsborough Barracks who are buried in the cemetery.

A bright morning at Wardsend with the sunlight casting long shadows and lighting up the memorials and crozzle walls. Crozzle was a by-product of steel making in the old cementation furnaces.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cementation_furnace,_Sheffield

Headstones in the older wooded section of the cemetery below the old Sheffield to Manchester railway line.

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Dr. Sara L Middleton @saralilplants.bsky.social · 08/02/2025

Happy #NationalSnowdropDay 🤍💚 Did you know that the organic compound Galantamine was first extracted from snowdrop bulbs about 80 years ago and is used to treat Alzheimer's disease?

A view from ground level looking skywards of a snowdrop flower. You can see other bunches on snowdrops in the background too.

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Nora's Guide to the Galaxy @ngttg.bsky.social · 17/06/2023

A YEAR OF SPACE FACTS: DAY 1/365 The photons we receive from the Sun take a little over 8 minutes to reach us from the surface of the Sun. But they are created deep in the core of the Sun, and it takes them 100,000s of years to get from the core to the surface!

An image of the Sun, bright orange, with a cutaway revealing interior layers of different bright colors. A circle with a gamma, indicating a photon, is superimposed on the core.

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Nereide @drnereide.bsky.social · 08/02/2025

🔭 🧪 🧵 #cosmology #Universe 1/ Using a combination of telescopes, a team of astronomers has discovered a monster radio jet, the largest ever in the early Universe, from the quasar J1601+3102, which existed when the Universe was only 1.2 billion years old. Reference➡️ noirlab.edu/public/news/...

The image is an artistic representation of the largest radio jet in the early Universe. The jet is two lobed. The image of J1601+3102 reveals an extended radio structure including a northern radio lobe, a southern radio lobe, and a core. The radio lobes of J1601+3102 are highly asymmetric in terms of their brightness and distance from the quasar.

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Arthur Vickers @ajcvickers.bsky.social · 08/02/2025

I love that #RustRover by #JetBrains automatically detected that I had #Rust installed on #WSL and used it.

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Arthur Vickers @ajcvickers.bsky.social · 08/02/2025

Starting today, putting #golang aside for a bit, and having a look at #Rust.

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Arthur Vickers @ajcvickers.bsky.social · 08/02/2025

This is my most treasured book. My dad got it for me when I was very young, and I read it so many times. #lovedbooks #wabi-sabi #Kipling #booksky

All the Mowgli Stories by Rudyard Kipling

Illustration from All the Mowgli Stories by Rudyard Kipling

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