Introduce Yourself - My first Outreachy Blog

Introduce Yourself - My Outreachy Blog

Start of the Journey

Hello all! This is Bowrna here. I am from Tamil Nadu, India. I lived my childhood days, completed my engineering degree in a small town in the southern part of Tamil Nadu. I started working in the tech industry from the year 2013 and moved to Chennai city. I did my engineering in Electronics and Communication, started with a networking-related tech job, and then moved to Cloud-based web app development. I had a steep learning curve both in my career and life in this phase. Looking back at my journey now, I feel it’s like a roller coaster ride. Persistence and Curiosity kept me going on this journey.

Tech Career

For the first two years of my career, I had a steep learning curve. As I was from a non-computer science background, I have to learn several things to catch up. I always felt I am doing less in this phase and tried to learn as many things as possible. I wish I could see my younger self one day and say that I have done a good job and not to feel less. I had great learning in cloud products, app development, scaling, distributed systems.

At the start of 2019, I started working as a backend engineer with an AI-based company in Chennai and had steep learning. After 6 years into tech, I again felt like a newbie here and pushed myself beyond boundaries to learn. It gave me immense happiness to learn new things in my work. Around the end of 2020, I took my maternity leave and joined back in work. I had a tiny baby in my hand who took a good chunk of my time. I found it difficult to hustle between multiple meetings in my day job and get my coding work done between these meetings and quickly complete the customer requirements within tight deadlines. I have put my health and mental peace to the least priority. I was running a race and didn’t see the finish line for a longer time. So I started to reflect back on my journey and tried to understand my thoughts. I jotted down things that give me happiness and things that deprive my energy. Journalling my thoughts helped me to make better decisions. This is one good habit that I recently picked up and I am so grateful for it. ( Thank you Bhavani ). Around the mid of 2021, I decided to leave my job to pursue things that interest me and take care of my little one.

Long time Dream

I had a dream where I want to contribute to open-source projects. So I started making small open-source contributions after I left my job. Working on it gives me a sense of accomplishment and happiness. Though Open-source communities are very welcoming, I had hesitance in the beginning. I wished I could get some mentorship to guide me in my journey into Open-source. When I was checking about communities that support people to start their contribution in Open-source I landed on Outreachy webpage. Outreachy program clearly fitted with things that give me happiness in work. I can contribute to open source projects, I will have a single project in my hand that I can focus on and get the work done, I can work with mentors who can help me to improve my skills. Here I am working as an intern for Apache Airflow. That’s the story of me.

The New beginning

I have faced many ups and downs in my journey. But persisting, not giving up easily, not hesitating to ask for help, curiosity are a few qualities that helped me to survive in this whole journey. I learned new things as well as unlearned things in my career. A steep learning curve happened in my career when I interacted with people around me, helped them solve the problem, worked along with them. I am really glad to be part of Outreachy and I am looking forward to more learning and support as many people around me evolve too. I will post more information about the Outreachy internship in my upcoming blogs. Thank you Bhuvana and Rakhi Kumari for your support. Your help and guidance have helped me to live my dream.