[chatmasta]

I find it’s much easier to contribute to a new codebase than it is to a large, mature one. When a project is in alpha stages, it’s usually mostly coded by one person, so you can clone it and easily understand the code just from a quick read. On the other hand, mature projects have many contributors and have evolved to an increased complexity due to many disparate abstraction layers, testing and build processes that need to account for the larger number of contributors.

I would recommend finding open source projects on Show HN and contributing to them early. This way you’ll make a big impact without too much cognitive overhead, and you might even eventually become a core contributor.