How to find project to create or to contribute?

Question

I'm a 20yo CS student. Recently I&rsquo;ve been wanting to test my skills on some real projects, but I&rsquo;m not very creative and can&rsquo;t think of ideas to build myself.I&rsquo;ve tried looking on GitHub to make some pull requests, but most projects I find either don&rsquo;t interest me or are too big and complicated to work on in my free time. Also, the GitHub Explore page doesn&rsquo;t really help &mdash; it keeps showing me the same kinds of projects and not enough interesting or beginner-friendly ones.For context, I know JavaScript and TypeScript, a bit of Java, and I&rsquo;m currently learning C at university.How did you find projects to start or contribute to when you were learning?

gus_massa · Accepted Answer

[reposting an old comment]Which open source projects are you using and you like? Try to contribute to them.Start sending bug reports that are very useful and sometimes underestimated. Look how/where they fix them and the next time try to send a pull request (or another bug report).Fixing typos in docs is also a good starting point.If you want to send a new feature, start with something small, like a weekend project. You never know if the maintainer will like it, or if they are morons or if they have very weird code rules.

pabs3 · Answer

My first FOSS contributions were to a hex editor (frhed), which I was using to cheat at the game Civilisation, by editing the saved game files. All software has bugs or missing features, no matter how experienced you are, you can always dive in and work on some aspect of them that affects you, or even just stuff you notice.