Contributing to open source projects

I have background in building business application software like banking, analytics, market research etc. I have tried to contribute to open source projects but it never took off. Most open source projects which interest me are databases, programming languages or libraries. But the way you write a database is very different from building business software and even though I look at their GitHub issues and Gitter channel talk I cannot became a contributor. Even though at my workplace I write tons of code for my application. Is there anyone here who was working on application development and then became a successful committer on an open source software like a programming language or databases? How did you succeed?