(new account, hit the HN anti-procrastination timer)
I hadn't contributed to Open Source before, had never wrote Java professionally, and my Android knowledge was pretty much non-existent, but I was aware of the project and how it operated. The catalyst was encountering a frustrating bug, and downloading the source to fix it.
The best thing about working on an application rather than a library is that you're dogfooding your own changes, and you have a good intuition for what the end result will be. You can always tell yourself: "Even if this isn't accepted, I find it useful and can use it".
I started out with small issues that I wanted improving, gradually moved on to getting access to crash reports, and fixing most of them (I think we're down from around 12 to 0.05 crashes per 1000 users). Confidence with larger issues comes from experience: documentation helps to some extent, but sitting down and reading the source code is always useful, as is looking to the source of the port as a source of truth.
Most projects would benefit from more volunteers (I just helped put out an ad for contributors on Stack Overflow). For confidence: accept that you're going to make mistakes as you start out, but the value that you bring to a project will overwhelmingly be net-positive as long as you stick with it.
I hadn't contributed to Open Source before, had never wrote Java professionally, and my Android knowledge was pretty much non-existent, but I was aware of the project and how it operated. The catalyst was encountering a frustrating bug, and downloading the source to fix it.
The best thing about working on an application rather than a library is that you're dogfooding your own changes, and you have a good intuition for what the end result will be. You can always tell yourself: "Even if this isn't accepted, I find it useful and can use it".
I started out with small issues that I wanted improving, gradually moved on to getting access to crash reports, and fixing most of them (I think we're down from around 12 to 0.05 crashes per 1000 users). Confidence with larger issues comes from experience: documentation helps to some extent, but sitting down and reading the source code is always useful, as is looking to the source of the port as a source of truth.
Most projects would benefit from more volunteers (I just helped put out an ad for contributors on Stack Overflow). For confidence: accept that you're going to make mistakes as you start out, but the value that you bring to a project will overwhelmingly be net-positive as long as you stick with it.