You have different options - here are some reflections of mine when I became V. P. Logging: http://www.grobmeier.de/hey-i-became-a-vice-president-07072012.html

You have different options - here are some reflections of mine when I became V. P. Logging: http://www.grobmeier.de/hey-i-became-a-vice-president-07072012.html http://www.grobmeier.de/hey-i-became-a-vice-president-070720... Here is another link, which helps you to understand how Apache works: http://www.apache.org/foundation/how-it-works.html http://www.apache.org/foundation/how-it-works.html Of course, you don't need to go to the ASF when doing Open Source. I found it great because its all around community there and there are many nice people. You could also simply start with getting the sources of the tools/lib/framework you use every day, be it on ASF or not. For example, I got the source code of Angular.js because I use it daily. Now when I need to implement something which makes me confused, I am looking into the Angular.js code to understand why it does confuse me. In many cases it's not easy and I leave it up for "later" (aka never), because of the time. But if I am REALLY interested I simply ask on the mailing list how things work. When you have got that knowledge, you can investigate if there is a better way and propose a patch/pull request. Also simply looking at the issue tracker and finding issue which are matching your skill level are a good start. You could also try to understand issues which are above your skill level, just to understand better how things work. After all, becoming a contributor is easy: asking and answering questions on mailing lists IS already a contribution to the open source project. Finding out on background, sending patches for typos in the docs, improving unit tests or implementing new features is of course a bigger contribution. If you are serious about getting into open source, then my advise is to flesh out an hour a day and walk intensive through code you find interesting. If it bores you, take something else. If not, understand things and simply get in touch with the dev, hopefully with some great patches.