Making Small Open Source Contributions

After spending six weeks learning more about open source, I frankly still find making contributions quite intimidating. The prospect of walking into a project, learning enough about it to make contributions, and then submitting my work to strangers to critique and possibly use in a release feels like a massive and scary undertaking, even if I am now somewhat knowledgeable about the process and know most contributors are excited to welcome new people into their projects.

For this reason, I have not made it very far with contributing to projects. I have made one OpenStreetMap contribution, adding a restaurant in my neighborhood to the map, but other than that I have no finished contributions. I am working to ammend this, as I have been finding a few projects that I plan on making more significant contributions to in the coming weeks. Currently I am eyeing Autogen, as they have a lot of documentation related issues and a few beginner friendly code issues that I feel comfortable taking on. Their community seems very active and their process for reviewing contributions is very well laid out, so I believe this will be a good place to make my first significant contributions. There has definitely been a steep learning curve getting started with contributing to open source, but I am becoming more confident and am excited to get deeper into the topic.