A lot of the advice on here is fantastic, but mostly relies on "being passionate about a project", or "pick a project you use". To me, the hardest part is actu

A lot of the advice on here is fantastic, but mostly relies on "being passionate about a project", or "pick a project you use". To me, the hardest part is actually finding the project you want to contribute to. I heard in school that I should contribute to open source, but at the time, all the programming I did was for class projects. When I heard the term "contribute to open source", my head heard something along the lines of "patch the linux kernel". I never really used all the cool libraries that exist for web or mobile development, so I had no idea what I would contribute to if I were to contribute to open source. I'd say first pick a project by going and building something that relies on some cool Github library. I don't think anyone but me clicks on the "Explore" tab on Github, but check it out, find a repository that you think is awesome, try using it in your own small project. Then I'd say go ahead and look at the issues that the library is having, and start tackling them one by one.