I have tried to contribute to open-source in the past, but have found the barrier to entry to be too great for me to make a meaningful contribution outside of "

I have tried to contribute to open-source in the past, but have found the barrier to entry to be too great for me to make a meaningful contribution outside of "I want to contribute". Even friendly communities that welcome contributors (in my experience, Umbraco) have strict (and at times unwritten) rules on how to contribute, and whether a contribution will be accepted by someone "not known". In the past I have contributed code to a few open-source projects, but purely on: * Small projects with a single owner. * Projects I actively use and require. * Projects where I have found a bug that might not be fixed if I don't contribute. This approach has worked nicely for me, and has allowed me to work on a wide range of tools, from Azure blob storage log providers in C# to a popular Twitter scraping tool in Node. Each time I have been thanked for my contribution, and each time my code has contributed to a new point release, and ultimately that's what it's all about. I won't be able to brag about being a core contributor to a major project, but my contributions are being used by real people on real problems. In short, I'd suggest not actively looking for a mainstream project, but any time you decide to use a Node package or a CLI tool, take a quick look at their GitHub repo and see how it is being maintained. If there are outstanding issues, try replicating them and see if it's possible to help.