Photo by Rob Allen from PHPUK 2009.

Welcome To My Website

Stuart Herbert is a highly experienced software engineer and operational manager who explores his professional and personal passions through teaching, talks, and writing.

His passions are for good engineering, good management, Linux, web-based applications (and PHP in particular), photography, walking, and T'ai Chi Ch'uan.

Stuart has contributed to several open-source projects since the early 1990's, most notably Gentoo Linux and Generic NQS.

Stuart holds a degree in Software Engineering from the University of Sheffield, and is a qualified teacher of adults for lifelong learning.

Welcome To My Blog

Invest In Loss

Invest In Loss is a philosophy of good management, based around the three core principles of Direction, Organisation and Supervision, which I've been developing since the 90's.

PHP

I've been programming in PHP since 1999. I've contributed articles to php|architect magazine, spoken at the php|cruise conference in 2004 (where I was voted Best Speaker), and co-authored the official Study Guide for the Zend PHP 4 Certification Exam.

Photography

One of the nice things about being married to an artist is the encouragement and coaching I get on my photography. Combine that with living very close to the Brecon Beacons, and when the weather's good, you can find me wandering the hills of South Wales with my beloved Nikon and Canon cameras.

My current photography project is Merthyr Road, an investigation of both the old and the new along the route from Cardiff to Merthyr Tydfil.

Tai Chi

I went to my first Tai Chi class because my wife didn't want to go there alone ... now I'm teaching a class of my own! How exactly did that happen? :) I'm interested in the deeper understanding and applications of this fantastic art, and especially in how we can improve the way Tai Chi is taught so that the health benefits can be enjoyed by anyone and everyone.

Personal Stuff

If you're still reading at this point :), I also keep a general (and somewhat disorganised) personal blog too, aimed more at friends and family.

Latest Blog Posts From Stu

Storyplayer Slides From PHP London Talk

  • Posted by Stuart Herbert
  • May 31, 2013

Storyplayer is DataSift’s test tool for functional and non-functional testing of software and services, built to test at the firehose scale. It sits nicely between PHPUnit for unit testing by developers, and Behat for acceptance testing by product managers.

Earlier this month, I spoke to a packed audience at the PHP London user group meetup about Storyplayer, a test tool that we’ve open-sourced here at DataSift.

Here are the slides from that talk, for everyone who hasn’t yet seen them via Twitter:

If you can’t see the embedded slides in this blog post, they’re available over on SpeakerDeck.

Right now, I’m focused on completing the online documentation (which is very much a work in progress), and preparing v1.1.0 with further improvements.

Phix 0.16.0 Released

  • Posted by Stuart Herbert
  • May 23, 2013

Phix is a tool for creating and managing PHP components and tools and releasing them as PEAR packages.

I’ve pushed out Phix 0.16.0 this evening, with the following changes:

  • phing build-vendor now removes the component’s own code from the vendor/ folder. (We build the vendor/ folder using PEAR, which installs the component into the vendor/ folder … sigh)
  • An update to Phing changed the default behaviour of the <fileset> tag, breaking backwards-compatibility. I’ve updated our build.xml file to make the <fileset> tag revert back to its original behaviour.

To update your copy of Phix, please run:

pear upgrade phix/phix4componentdev

Any problems, please let me know.

25×9: Daffodil In The Graveyard

  • Posted by Stuart Herbert
  • May 11, 2013

Project 25×9, because some photos deserve a wider perspective …

Daffodil In The Graveyard (25x9 version)

A guest photo by Mrs H!

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Photography: Merthyr Road | Daily Desktop Wallpaper | 25×9 | Twitter.