This talk is about my experience of restarting my work after taking a career break. I had to take a break after my maternity leave due to increasing stress at work and my physical health was not in good shape. While I wanted a break I was also afraid that I won't be able to start working again. So I made a concrete plan on how I am going to spend my time during the career break and started focussing on the open source project in the little time I got.

From then I got an opportunity to secure a scholarship and internship in the Outreachy program and worked on Airflow project. That was the turning point and from then I gradually started making more open-source contributions to Airflow. It took me about a year to gain momentum and I started checking for part-time opportunities as I have to be the primary care-giver for my kid too. Finally, I landed in job that perfectly fits me and here I am pursuing the work that I was afraid I wouldn't come back.

In this talk I will talk about making the first contribution to open source, how to make a positive impact on open source projects and get more out of it, being your own driver, and how working consistently in open source pays off.

I will also talk about how my intention to contribute to open source shifted from personal reason to keep myself occupied to a bigger goal of making a contribution to open source software and being part of the community