I agree. I’m very grateful to OSS developers. I use almost exclusively OSS software every day at this point, and it wouldn’t be possible without the countless people devoting countless hours of their valuable time to these projects.

So, a question to devs, especially for smaller, more approachable projects: I have a minor (plus a bit more) in CS, a lifetime of casual coding, but never really built anything larger-scale than a C-based sh-like shell in one of my CS courses, or many years ago an IRC front-end for a chatbot engine. Mostly I just write scripts (sometimes kinda complex), or small C/C++ projects. I would try to contribute to a project directly, but I don’t want to step on toes, and most projects have people who are deeply intertwined in the code of the project. It feels impossible to get involved in any way other than testing without possibly just annoying people who have been doing it for years. I’ve known enough intimidating grizzled *nix guru people to make me paranoid that I’ll just get in the way.

How do you get a foothold in a project? Should I just start with creating my own OSS project, and once I get somewhere where I’m familiar with the flow and project management and such, then I can consider contributing more to other projects?

Or is it really more helpful to the community to just test stuff, create documentation, answer questions, etc? Would becoming another dev be more helpful to OSS, or would working on supporting projects in these other ways be more helpful?