Author here: I started by making really small patches at the beginning and building up credibility with the team. For example, one of my earliest commits was ju

Author here: I started by making really small patches at the beginning and building up credibility with the team. For example, one of my earliest commits was just to add better verbiage on migrations (https://github.com/rails/rails/commit/b4c99ea0a4d7e5223fa1b21cdb9301f9d090dbfe https://github.com/rails/rails/commit/b4c99ea0a4d7e5223fa1b2...). Eventually the core team saw my name enough that my pull requests could get more complex.