Been using a fairly popular open source library at work for almost a year now, comfortable enough with the codebase from regular daily use that I noticed a small, genuinely fixable bug last week while actually debugging something else entirely unrelated in one of our own internal projects at work. Part of me wants to actually go ahead and submit a proper fix for it, but I have never contributed to any open source project before, and something about the entire process still feels genuinely intimidating to actually attempt for the very first time.
Read through the project's own contributing guidelines a couple of times now, which are honestly reasonably clear and well written as far as documentation goes, but the actual social part of it, opening an issue first to properly discuss it, or submitting a full pull request directly without asking anyone first, still feels like a bit of a genuine unknown to me personally since I have simply never actually done either before myself.
Worried a little about submitting something that maintainers might consider genuinely too minor or not quite worth their specific time and attention, though the bug itself does actually affect real functionality in a small but genuinely noticeable way whenever it actually occurs during normal regular use of the library.
A colleague who has contributed to a few different open source projects herself over the years said her own very first contribution was similarly small in scope, and that the maintainers in her specific case were actually genuinely welcoming rather than dismissive the way she had originally, and needlessly, worried about beforehand.
For people who remember their own actual first open source contribution clearly, was the experience genuinely as intimidating as it feels beforehand from the outside looking in, or did it turn out to be considerably more straightforward once you actually went ahead and did it yourself for the first time?