When I submitted the free version of Chimp Bridge, I got an email back saying it was rejected. Because data coming into the plugin wasn’t always being validated properly.

Though a lot of the code was created by someone else, that’s no excuse and I should have done a better job checking that data is being properly validated and escaped before being saved to the database, and I also made some mistakes myself.

So I invest a bit of time thinking about what that might be like. After all, they haven’t happened yet, and in some cases, they may never happen. I'm a man who loves his life, his family and his friends. I enjoy running my small business and my work in developing high-tech medical devices.

When something bad does happen, I’m less surprised and more able to handle it – because I already have some kind of plan. I graduated from The Ohio State University in 1983 with a Bachelor's degree in Computer and Information Science.

My friends know that I have been studying Stoicism over the past few months.

One practice Stoic philosophers advocated was Premeditatio Malorum – anticipating things that might go wrong before they have occurred. If I’m looking forward to some event, I might spend a few minutes imagining what it would be like for the event to be canceled.

Another example is thinking about losing control some aspect of my life.

I am currently in good health, but I know this won’t last forever.

The day will come when I can no longer run, go hiking, etc. I’m not spending hours dwelling on possible bad outcomes.

I have an external REST service that processes and validates form data from various sites.

One of the things I need to be able to do is somehow query wordpress from this service to see if a user is valid.