There's a lot of low hanging fruit out there, you just have to recognize it or be lucky enough to stumble facefirst into it. I recently joined a budding open-s

There's a lot of low hanging fruit out there, you just have to recognize it or be lucky enough to stumble facefirst into it. I recently joined a budding open-source project (PhobGCC, a custom gamecube controller), saw that it was using a rather overbuilt full kalman filter, and within 2 days of work rewrote it into a less generalized filter that ran 7x faster (later improved even further) and performed even better at its filtering task. It was super basic work, despite it having been almost a decade since I last studied control systems, but it made a really big difference for the project.