Dickpics are an alternative solution too . <| sep |> Mature projects that have a lot of bugs will have ranging difficulties . There are often bugs that are very easy but also very low priority . Perfect for a newbie . Also you can pick small mature projects . In the process of writing my own first open source project years ago , as a pretty inexperienced programmer reading through that code today is painful , I had to use about a half dozen other open source librariescomponents . Every single one of those is something I could have contributed to and one of them I did , extensively . For sure it ' s possible to bite off more than you can chew . This is not a reason to not attempt to take a goodsized bite . Just looking at mature code written by other experienced programmers is so much more useful than looking at code from other noobs . Humans learn many skills in large part by imitation .