Miranda Wilson

Hi, I’m Miranda. I’m a technical writer.

I work for Snowplow; I own the product documentation.

Previously I was a software developer, and before that, a cell biologist. I live in London, UK.

GitHub · LinkedIn · email

Some things I’ve done

I’m the first ever technical writer at Snowplow. The Snowplow docs had no official owner from 2012 until 2025 🫥

The Snowplow product docs repo is open source, so you can see all my changes. Here are some highlights.

AI and LLMs

We’re living in the future.

• To improve ingestion by LLMs, I built a Markdown converter that has full support for tabs, Mermaid, and custom components
• Automatic PR reviews by Claude have saved me so much time
• For better AIO and SEO, I used AI to add a description and keywords to all files

CI/CD

Clarity! Quality*! The satisfaction of automating things!

• Fail the build on broken anchors as well as broken internal links
• This workflow checks for the required SEO/AIO metadata

*I’ve read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance more than once

Product releases

The docs for upcoming releases need to be shareable before general availability, and ready to go live on release day.

• The docs for our new product Identities were a collaboration between me, the Product Manager, and a couple of engineers
• The initial docs for our big new product, Signals, covered the concepts, SDKs, the UI (a last minute addition), notebooks, and tutorials

Content refactoring

Sometimes, there’s a gap in release deadlines and I get to treat myself to some refactoring.

• I restructured the pages and added a complete set of examples for our complicated code generation tool, Snowtype
• Overhaul of outdated and incomplete reference of built-in event types

Information architecture

Improving knowledge discoverability.

• Landing pages with CTAs and links to popular pages
• I added headings to the side navigation to highlight Signals, our important new product

Science

I spent 12 years researching cell metabolism: PhD at Imperial College London, and postdoc at University College London. I have over 25 publications.

Much like being a tech writer, being a cell biologist requires many overlapping skill sets:

• Designing and performing experiments
• Growing cells to do things with
• Making tools and reagents
• Analyzing data
• Managing and ordering stocks and supplies
• Writing in the passive voice
• Copy editing and reviewing other people’s papers
• Teaching and mentoring students
• Persisting despite the constant failures and glacial pace of progress
• Giving presentations
• Cleaning and maintaining the lab

Notable publications:

• The culmination of my postdoc, a first-author research paper. I showed that one of the molecules I studied was something to do with cellular phosphate metabolism.
• Methods papers are scientific documentation that explain how to perform a technique. Here I described how to extract and concentrate certain molecules from cells.
• A literature review summarising the current knowledge about the molecules I worked on.