Interested to contribute to Open Source? But you think you cannot do it? You are wrong! I'll tell you why. I felt the same. But consistently trying lead me to contribute to something that I never thought I'll be able to. Consistency is key.

1. Choose your open source project.
2. Watch the issues and PRs (get email notifications!)
3. Help the community by checking issues. People literally say "help me somebody". And each project has only so many maintainers and contributors, they always need help to look at issues

With regards to issues - Reproduce issues. Confirm them. Report duplicate issues if you know it. Look at code may be. If issue is a question, see if you can answer
4. Once you start seeing code, and know how to fix the issue, start raising PRs. Write tests! Make em robust!

When fixing bugs, always write a failing test based on the bug. Then fix the bug to pass the test. How much ever time it takes to write the tests, just do it. Trust me, tests are worth it! Next time you will know if some new code breaks the expected behavior :)

Once you raise PRs, you know some basic hygiene for code. Tests, CI passing, other GitHub checks passing, readable code, consistency with existing code, iterative changes and small commits, that are easy to understand and review (instead of big bang changes).

You can recommend these things and more to new contributors, based on your experience of merged PRs.

5. When looking at issues, encourage folks who raised issue to raise PRs. You will be surprised at how many people are interested and excited to raise PRs to fix their own issues :)

Experiences from Contributing to @HelmPack