How do you contribute to open source projects?

I wrote a post about making my first contribution to the open source project. https://rasulkireev.com/open-source-contributions/

Hope it's useful

If you are interested with data science & data projects. Hop on the wagon on HuggingFace datasets. They had a recent sprint where they invited the community to add language datasets to their repos.
The sprint is over, but you could still keep adding new datasets

Link to their newsletter.
https://huggingface.curated.co/issues/5

Go to the GitHub repo, find something that is not working, create a fork or branch, fix what is not working and do a pull request ;-)

Don't worry mate, let's start with small and grow big. I started open source contributions aggressively. And published my packages to NPM as well.

https://github.com/sanmak/sumo-queue/
https://github.com/sanmak/json-to-kotlin-class/
https://github.com/sanmak/dockerfile-samples

https://www.npmjs.com/package/sumo-queue
https://www.npmjs.com/package/json-to-kotlin-class

Why not use my packages and start contributing. Packages are written in 100% raw Javascript except docker package. Raise a feature, bug or update readme.

Looking forward to see you in GITHUB.

For me personally, I found it useful to contribute back into projects I actually use. Every now and again I'd find myself having to fork and patch a library to fix an issue I was facing. Most of the time the patch would be useful for everyone so I open a PR back into the main project.

A smaller project is also much much easier to get involved in. I've been using a new Ruby powered static site generator called Bridgetown for approx 2 months. It's less than a year old so I contributed a few small PRs implementing changes I'd made while building a few sites with it and I became active on their issues/PRs etc. This led to me being invited to join their core team. This would never have been possible with something like Rails which I've been using for about a year and never come close to contributing back into.

So I'd recommend starting with a project that you use yourself; preferably a smaller one. If there's nothing you've modified in the project to fit your needs; take a look at the issues for a good starter issue; or browse through the docs. A lot of people get started by fixing issues or improving documentation.

Go to a big project, visit the contributing.md file, and follow their directions =D