I would recommend contributing code to a well known FOSS project, or at least an existing project that you use or respect. I think hacking on meaningful project

I would recommend contributing code to a well known FOSS project, or at least an existing project that you use or respect. I think hacking on meaningful projects will be clear milestones for yourself, which seems to be what you’re looking for. To encourage you, here are a couple of contributions I have to Linux and Hadoop: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/0bef71093d4461659643ddcef431d88a078e0407 https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/0bef71093d446165964... https://github.com/apache/hadoop/pull/114 https://github.com/apache/hadoop/pull/114 If you read through the commit messages and look at the patches, I think you’ll find that reaching these clear milestones doesn’t take an unattainable amount of skill; just a bit of patience and curiosity.