Giving Back with Time and Code

Note: If you’re religious, read my thoughts on this is at my spiritual blog.

As I constantly confess, I live a truly blessed life. So much so that I feel I have to start giving back. Since this giving back thing is going to occupy the next 20 years worth of my life, I figure I should give a bit of backstory. I’d like to talk a bit about where this desire comes from, why I feel like I can give back and how I’m planning to go about doing it. This is not about Open Source Software, but the beginning of something I’m going to sappily call Open Hope Software.

I see my life as a product of 20 year increments:

The first 20: Where My Desire to Give Back Comes From – Being Poor but Loved and Lucky

The second 20: Why I Can Give Back – Help Along the Way that Made Me Successful

The next 20: How I’m Giving Back – Biggest Dreams / Toughest Challenges Yet

There’s a lot of words across those 3 posts, but I’m kicking off what has got to be the most important chapter of my life to the world. The first 20 was the most important to me. The second 20 was the most important to my family. Both of those were very integral parts of what made me who I am today, but it’s not what I’ll likely be remembered by the masses for. It’ll be the stuff coming in the next 20, but I want to let everyone know that the past 40 years made possible that Tom Ortega you might hear about someday. It’s important to me that everyone see that they too can make a difference in the world starting at 40, by just using what fate gave them during their first 40 years.

I’m taking a huge leap of faith by assuming I will be successful of doing some great things in the next 20 years. However, even if I fail, I’d like to chronicle that failure so that others can learn from my mistakes and avoid them. If I succeed, then I’ll have these humble writings to remind me that I wasn’t some genius that planned it all, but rather was a simple guy with a big heart and big ideas.