I would suggest that you identify a bug or missing feature in an Open Source project that you personally use, and fix/implement it. This helps ensure you under

I would suggest that you identify a bug or missing feature in an Open Source project that you personally use, and fix/implement it. This helps ensure you understand the issue, provides motivation to work on it, and ideally to continue to support your work into the future. I find there's no shortage of such opportunities, and that the interaction with the project owners/maintainers has helped me to learn productive communication strategies, good approaches to proposing new ideas, etc.