[mmebane]

> HOW do you go on about doing that?

Start small. There are tons of open-source projects that would appreciate help fixing small issues. For example, I've found Mozilla to be very helpful in mentoring developers who are earnest about trying to contribute to Firefox.

And if none of the large projects have any tasks that strike your fancy, pick something on GitHub, fork it, fix a bug or improve some documentation, and submit a pull request. Worst case is you'll run into a jerk or someone who doesn't want outside help, but at least you'll get some experience with the process, and with learning to read other people's code.