Usually, the best packages come about when people are motivated to creating something specific, for example if they think the status quo in some domain is not good enough.

I'm sure we can dig up a handful of old, badly maintained projects that could use some love. Off the top of my head, it would be nice to have

* Micro-optimized our smith-waterman algorithm. That's probably fairly easy to get started with if you're not a bio person

* A number of our parsers have not been properly maintained. We use finite state automata https://github.com/BioJulia/Automa.jl to create parsers. That's for more advanced users

* We need to consolidate our scattered sources of k-mer analysis code. Another developer is re-writing our k-mer iterator protocol, but we need a big toolbox for k-mer counting, minhashing, calculating k-mer spectra etc. That's also very computer-sciency and no so much biological

Feel free to get in touch on the Julia Slack, or send me an email :)