[detaro]

What you do is also very important, and it's normal that a project has people with different levels of skill and knowledge about the details in it. So no, you are not doing it wrong!

If you want to get more into the details:

If you already do useful work for the project, you should be able to ask one of the devs more familiar with the internals for help/review. Try finding some "easy" issues in less scary parts of the code and work on those, then work your way up. Just because you don't understand all aspects enough doesn't mean you can't start working on some of them.

If you as someone quite familiar with the project has trouble getting started, that should be a sign that onboarding (e.g. high-level documentation of what happens internally) could be improved, and hopefully is something other devs support. Maybe you could write docs about what you learn and have it reviewed by them -> learning effect for you, better docs for the project.

[bbcbasic]

> What you do is also very important, and it's normal that a project has people with different levels of skill and knowledge about the details in it. So no, you are not doing it wrong!

Companies need product owners, project managers, testers, support staff, technical authors and many other non-coding roles (roles not mapped 1-1 with people: a coder can where these hats too). So I suggest open source projects need this too and the OP's role is quite valuable. It can be useful also to have someone say ELI5 to make sure the coders can justify those funky changes!