As a senior Computer Science student, I am constantly hearing about how great it is to contribute to open source projects on github. Many job listings list it as a qualification or a “plus”, and it is casually thrown around in conversation at all kinds of seminars and events at school. Sounds great, I should do that! The only problem is: I’m a huge noob! I’ve done well in my computer science classes at school, sure, and I’ve built some projects that my family and friends think are cool, yes, but surely I can’t contribute in any meaningful way to a project with real users, right? Right?

Wrong!! There are a variety of different ways to make substantive contributions to open source projects on github, even as a total rookie. You don’t have to be able to read and understand all 100,000 lines of rails or know how to fix…