> Open source projects might seem like a good place to look since the code is readily available, but be wary as they are also known to be heavily gatekeeped and

> Open source projects might seem like a good place to look since the code is readily available, but be wary as they are also known to be heavily gatekeeped and often getting started is more difficult than it should be. This is certainly true for some projects, and as a beginner I'd steer clear from them. To pile onto the generalizations with another one, I've found that a project is FAR more likely to accept contributions (or even discuss ideas with outsiders) if it has some kind of mechanism for accepting pull requests (be it on GitHub or elsewhere). What's that you say? Send a patch? To your mailing list? And then we'll talk? No thanks, I'll lend my support elsewhere... (Not always true, of course, but it should sound familiar to some of us.)