[bleezy]

It can be difficult for an outsider to contribute to open source projects. Very large projects don't have simple, easy-to-fix, outstanding issues. 'Outsiders' are generally not aware of smaller projects that would welcome their contributions. And these smaller projects generally have a very niche use. For this reason the majority of open source contributions I've made have been to roguelike games, and generally those that I'm extremely familiar with.

To be honest, a PR from someone who doesn't use your software, who is unfamiliar with its structure and only wants her PR merged so that she can say 'I am an open source contributor' is a hassle.

I also think it's unfortunate that the author thinks her feelings might be due to impostor syndrome, when she is quite clearly an impostor to some degree.

My best advice would be to stop looking for a repository to contribute to. Just keep using software that you find helpful, and eventually you will find yourself using a small library with some missing features that you can add. Or, just host all of the software you write on GitHub. Create nice readmes. Create issues and releases. Talk about your project in a forum of likely users. Maybe someone will contribute to your code. Boom. Now you are part of the open source community.

[dom0]

> To be honest, a PR from someone who doesn't use your software, who is unfamiliar with its structure and only wants her PR merged so that she can say 'I am an open source contributor' is a hassle.

This is a reason why mandatory open source contributions (yes, that's part of some curriculae nowadays) are a double-edged sword. On the one hand, some of these go on and do valuable work, others just want to invest the absolute minimum effort to pass the class.

[nebabyte]

Hah, that seems like a terrible idea. Do instructors think there is a limitless well of trivially-findable bugs that could be correctly fixed by beginning/intermediate CS students...?

I suppose if the instructor is running the project that's a different story - just upload a buggy-as-hell project with fixes you expect students to be capable of - and preclude unleashing your class on the community at large until you can (patiently and didactically, because you know them to be beginners to VCS) show them the ropes on something harmless...

Of course, I'm sure that's not the case everywhere, and god help those who have to deal with that.

[Macha]

Could explain a weird thing that happened to me. I used to throw everything on github as a teen, got a pull request last year to a to-do list app I'd written to learn python years ago

[infodroid]

> Very large projects don't have simple, easy-to-fix, outstanding issues.

This isn't generally true.

Large and well-established open source projects usually have dedicated schemes to match new contributors with simple tasks.

For example, here is the GNOME program which gets you started with some hand-picked, newcomer-friendly tasks:

https://wiki.gnome.org/Newcomers/SolveProject

Similarly, LibreOffice has the "Easy Hacks" project:

https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/EasyHacks