Sally Makin
Specialist Technical Author at Canonical
Canterbury, England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolSally Makin is a Specialist Technical Author at Canonical who crafts clear, structured documentation for the Ubuntu Server team and contributes upstream to projects like the widely used cloud-init documentation. With a Ph.D. in Physics and 8+ years of industry experience including 4+ years in research, she brings rigorous scientific communication skills—evidenced by eight published journal articles and a journal-highlighted paper—to technical writing and editing. She founded SOS Writing Ltd to help STEM students with writing, producing guides, a PDF book, and a beginner LaTeX video series while self-teaching web and SEO skills to run the business end-to-end. Sally combines hands-on experience operating and documenting scientific instruments (co-authoring an observatory operations manual) with mentoring and teaching across university and industry settings. Known for reorganizing docs using frameworks like Diataxis and improving usability details such as navigation and styling, she blends technical accuracy with user-focused design.
3 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Astronomy and Astrophysics, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Astronomy and Astrophysics at University of Kent
Portuguese, Swedish, French, English
Github Skills (4)
restructuredtext10
sphinx10
documentation10
yaml6
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
canonical/cloud-init
Oct 2022 - Feb 2025
Official upstream for the cloud-init: cloud instance initialization
Role in this project:
Technical Writer
Technical WriterContributions:382 reviews, 24 PRs, 376 comments in 2 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Sally's contributions primarily focused on improving the cloud-init documentation. They added links, corrected formatting, and re-organized the documentation structure using the Diataxis framework, which included migrating content, updating the index page, and aligning the navigation bar. Their work also involved adding a Google search verification file and making cosmetic improvements to the documentation, such as increasing font weight and styling the sidebar.
gcppythonagnosticinfrastructure-managementupstream
s-makin/ubuntu-pro-client
Nov 2022 - Apr 2025
Ubuntu Pro Client for offerings from Canonical
Contributions:86 pushes, 63 branches in 2 years 5 months
linuxubuntu-procanonicalubuntu
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.