What About Doug?
Doug Bierer has been hooked on computers since his first
program, written on a DEC PDP-8, in 1971. In his wide-ranging
career, Doug has been a professional contract programmer since
1978, having written applications in BASIC, PL/I, assembler, FORTH,
C, C++, dBase/FoxBase/Clipper, Pascal, Perl, Java, Python and PHP.
He deployed his first website in 1993 while living in San
Francisco. He speaks four languages, has traveled extensively and
now resides in Thailand. He also spent some years doing system
administration and TCP/IP networking. Some of his technical works
include PHP 8 Programming Tips, Tricks and Best Practices
PHP 7 Programming Cookbook and Learning MongoDB 4.x
(Packt), as well as
Learning PHP and MySQL, Learning PHP Security and Learning Doctrine (O'Reilly Media).
His fictional works include The End, And Then?
and Further Indications.
His most current authoring project is a book PHP Programming in the AI Era,
published by Packt in July 2026.
He founded unlikelysource.com in April 2008.
A self-described Slow Tourist, and certified Digital
Nomad, Doug has lived in ...
- Rochester (NY USA)
- Tours (France)
- San Francisco Bay Area (California USA)
- Utrecht (the Netherlands)
- Wokingham (England)
- Gothenburg (Sweden)
- Aberdeen (Scotland)
- Surin (Thailand)
- Bangkok (Thailand)
... and now Siem Reap (Cambodia).
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Fun Facts About Doug
- The first computer he bought was a PAIA P4700J that he built himself. Although a starving
student at the time, he won a mini-grant from the State University
of Potsdam, NY for an IBM 360/370 mainframe program, written in
PL/I, that analyzed French poetry.
- His first assembler language was for the Motorola 6809
processor, learned on a Radio Shack Color Computer
- He used to bicycle to an early job on the night shift of a
nursing home with a Commodore 64 and green-screen monitor in his
back pack
- One of his early commercial contracts was writing a human
resources report in dBase III for the FDIC (Federal Deposit
Insurance Corporation). The manager was unable to tell him what was
supposed to go into the report. The only person who knew had been
reassigned to Alaska.
- Doug has been a member of 7 different rock bands, 4 different
jazz bands, plays the trombone, bass guitar and keyboards, and
composes all of his own music.
- He's lived in 14 different cities on three different continents
and speaks three languages fluently, with a smattering of Khmer,
Spanish, Dutch and German.
- He currently lives in Cambodia with his wife Nimol, three kids,
one mother-in-law, and various stray street dogs and cats.
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Zend Certifications
The reason why he's in Cambodia:
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