How to Start Contributing to FOSS as an Ubernoob?
Basically title, but for some background:
I'm a student in post-secondary education that has dabbled in programming for about a decade, but never really completed any large projects. I've made simple shell scripts, but consider that "real" development work. When I tried looking at pull requests/issues and the respective APIs of FOSS projects such as GNOME or KDE apps, the code would just completely go over my head. I would have no idea how to even start solving the problem or where/what the bug even is! It just made me feel all the much more worse because I was too broke to donate to awesome projects I use, but also too moronic to contribute bug fixes. I would appreciate any and all advice, thanks!
Find a small project that you're interested in and check out the developmental discussion channels to see if there's any way you can lend a hand. Starting with trying to find complex coding tasks in large bureaucratic projects is setting yourself up for failure IMO.
For example, https://zynaddsubfx.sourceforge.io/contribute.html shows a few different levels of involvement in one project I maintain. That's not me saying you should work on this project specifically though; you'll want to find projects that you're enthusiastic to learn about.
Depending on what kind of person you are, a different strategy would be in order, i.e if you tend to like being thrown in the deep-end try tackling the biggest github open issue you think you can handle.
If your the type to ease into things, find good-first-issues of projects you like:
checkout, feel free to reach out! :)
https://github.com/nabaz-io/nabaz/issues/2