I use open source self hosted software everyday. I love the community and I would love to be able to contribute to some of these projects.
As far as code goes, I basically no nothing about how it works. I see the development section of the repos I use and again, I’ve go no idea how it works.
How can I teach myself how to offer small improvements to the projects I use?
Not all support of oss is code related. Updating documentation is a really important part too but programmers are generally bad at it.
Translating documentation to other languages too.
For a project I liked I saw that the translation of the UI was only about 1% complete for my native language. I decided to dedicate the weekend to get it above 95%. This was apparently the part that seemed too hard for most to make a dent in, but across several new versions my language is still 100%. I think my groundwork made it easier for some sporadic contributors to get a small bit of dopamine when updating the few new strings in a release to see it hit 100% again.
You are the hero your community needed! It makes a huge difference for a lot of people when they can read a screen without having to guess what the English words mean.
And translations for the application itself in some cases, so that it can be ran and used in different languages. Human contributions to the language files of the application is what my project needs more than anything else, and if you do speak a non-English language fluently, I’d be very grateful! Here’s how I’ve worded it for my project: