I do maintain big OSS projects and and try to contribute as well.
However contribution experience can very bad, if you follow the path of picking the most famous objects. Good luck contributing to Node, Rust, Shadcn and etc - they do not need your contribution, their PR queue is overloaded and they can't handle it. Plus you need to get to their internal circles first, though quite complex process.
The world is much bigger. There are so many help required from the smaller but still active projects.
Just recently I raised 3 small PRs, and they reviewed the same day!
As a my respect to all the OSS community, I have build https://helpwanted.dev/ website, which in the nutshell shows latest "help wanted" and "good first issue" issues, from all over github in the last 24 hours.
You would be amazed how many cool projects out of there looking for the help!
