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What about documentation? Often times its easier to improve the docs than to improve the code. And let's face it - most open source projects have awful documentation!

If you don't want to interact with open source project maintainers, you could try writing example programs, tutorials, or guides for products you like - that's another form of contribution.

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That's exactly what I did in a recent project. Basically, I found a cool library, but the docs were pretty spotty, so I fleshed it out a bit as I became more familiar with the code. I ended up doing some minor refactoring to make the library more consistent (e.g. naming, this was just before a major release).

After that, I ended up finding a bug, and since I was already familiar with the code from fixing minor documentation stuff, I was able to submit a patch without asking anyone.

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