Asking the community is the important part. I went into a community asking where to get started working on a feature I wanted, and I got a lot more pushback th

Asking the community is the important part. I went into a community asking where to get started working on a feature I wanted, and I got a lot more pushback than I expected. Basically, it was obvious that I didn't know the codebase very well and was expecting someone to walk me through it. Starting with a small ticket is a good way to get introduced to a limited portion of the codebase, which will help you ask better questions when you inevitably want to add a feature. I went into another community with a patch for my use case, and it was rejected because it didn't fit with the overall goals of the project. If I had made more of an effort to engage over the mailing list, I could have saved myself a lot of work and perhaps ended up with a better solution. So yes, absolutely get involved in the mailing lists after doing some basic legwork yourself (get your dev environment set up, read some recent mailing list entries to get a feel for the most active people, etc).