First, to be a good contributor, you almost always have to be a consumer of the library. Once you understand how the library usage works, then you can work on

First, to be a good contributor, you almost always have to be a consumer of the library. Once you understand how the library usage works, then you can work on improving the api, fix bugs, or even just improving the documentation. Read the source code, and see if you can find any small wins such as optimizations or better api.