About

I’m Rick Sullivan. I’m a software engineer at Microsoft, living in my hometown of Portland, OR with my wife and our golden retriever.

I work on the Microsoft Copilot Studio team, making a platform for others to build AI agents. Outside of work, I like to run, cycle, and hike.

Reach out to me at [email protected], or check out my professional experience on my resume.

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Articles

• Using GraphQL with JSON APIs

  November 27th, 2019

  I’ve had the pleasure of working with GraphQL in some of our more recently built applications. Developing frontend applications backed by a GraphQL API is the most productive my team and I have ever been. The flexibility provided lets you try out a variety of UX solutions to your problem, without any additional work to restructure your backend.

• Getting Sagemaker Models to Production

  September 30th, 2018

  About a year ago, Amazon publicly released Sagemaker, its platform for training and managing machine learning models. Sagemaker has an appealing value proposition–users can train models and tune hyperparameters using on-demand EC2 instances with a variety of hardware options, and models are stored for deployment to endpoints with IAM access control. On my team, we chose Sagemaker for managing our training and deployment of a text classification algorithm using a Tensorflow neural network. Here are some of the things I learned while creating an automated path to production.

• Docker SSH configurations for development

  August 30th, 2018

  In a previous post about Docker for Mac, I described a way to make SSH keys available inside of Docker containers–here’s a simpler approach with a few advantages over my previous suggestion. Docker volumes allow you to link directories from your host machine to the Docker container, even if the host location is outside of the directory with your docker-compose.yml.

• Adding a Contact Form to Your Static Site

  June 9th, 2018

  Want to add a contact form to your simple static site? Here’s how to do it with near-zero costs, easy setup, and easy teardown if you want to replace the backend with your own server-based application.

• Passwordless Logins in Phoenix

  June 7th, 2018

  Maybe you’ve seen the slick “Magic Link” login that Slack and other apps now support: here’s how you can support that flow in a Phoenix app.

more articles

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Projects

• Scribe

  Scribe is a machine transcription service with GraphQL and REST APIs for easy integration. It supports transcription of many audio/video source types, and provides a dashboard for managing transcripts, API keys, and billing.

• Label Reader

  A computer vision project that can identify the nutrutional content from a picture of a food's USDA nutrition labels. Completed as my undergraduate these project, which won best-in-session as decided by industry judges.

• SCU Transcript

  A Python web application to format web transcripts downloaded from the eCampus website. Web transcripts are plain text documents with whitespace characters for formatting. Students often copy the text into Microsoft word, which mangles the already poor formatting. This app builds and compiles a well-formatted LaTeX pdf document.

• Schedule Suggester

  A Javascript application to builds a custom year schedule for first-year Computer Engineering or Web Design majors at Santa Clara University. Accounts for AP and other credits.