Stuart Herbert

Stuart Herbert is a software engineer and operational manager, with over ten years of experience in software design, implementation, support, and in technical and operational management. His career to date includes projects and/or roles with household names including Eurostar, Hewlett-Packard, Orange, and Vodafone. He has written for php|architect magazine, and was an invited speaker for the very first php|cruise conference in 2004. He is a co-author of the official Study Guide for the Zend PHP Certification Exam. He is currently creating The Web Platform, a systematic and comprehensive review of web hosting architecture and web software design.

He current works as the Software Projects Manager for Gradwell.com, one of the UK's leaders in unifed communications, and the UK's third-largest VoIP provider.

He previously worked Box UK, authors of the Amaxus XML Content Management System, the UK's leading PHP-based CMS product, where he managed and worked on projects for clients such as the Ordnance Survey, the British Computer Society, English Heritage, Lloyds TSB, the Imperial War Museum, the Office of Rail Regulation, and many more.

Stuart is a graduate and former member of staff of the University of Sheffield.

During his three years as a volunteer developer for the Gentoo Linux distribution, Stuart was responsible for guiding the project's standards and support for World Wide Web technologies such as the Apache web server and the popular programming language PHP. He was the original author of webapp-config - Gentoo's installation tool for web-based applications - the first such tool to be included in any major Linux distribution. He also pioneered changes to Gentoo designed to bridge the gap between the developer and user communities with initiatives such as Planet Gentoo and Gentoo Overlays. Stuart left Gentoo at the end of November, 2006.

Away from computers, Stuart teaches the Chinese art of T'ai Chi Ch'uan through the Vale of Glamorgan Lifelong Learning programme, and is a self-taught musician. Originally from his beloved Yorkshire, Stuart is actively involved in preserving the history of the South Wales Valleys through his photography project Merthyr Road.

You can contact Stuart online via stuart at stuartherbert.com, and follow his diary.