Easy, don't try to contribute things too far above your skill set. If a codebase is too complicated, avoid code modifications. Instead of offering a fix, provid

Easy, don't try to contribute things too far above your skill set. If a codebase is too complicated, avoid code modifications. Instead of offering a fix, provide easy to follow step by step records of how to trigger a bug. Help an organization with documentation. Help out with trying to manage a bug tracker. When making changes keep them simple. As another comment points out there are often labels which indicate what tasks could be easy. That includes "Good First Issue" as well as "First-timers-only" labels. Quite a while back I wrote https://zynaddsubfx.sourceforge.io/contribute.html https://zynaddsubfx.sourceforge.io/contribute.html which walks through various levels of complexities and how to get started. Other open source projects may have similar getting started guides.