Make my first contribution to open source software.

Awesome!

Contribute to something existing, or roll your own?

@bittersweet Contribute to something existing. Not even sure to what yet, but the idea of giving back (no matter how great or little) to the community appeals to me.

Basically same here. I wrote some documentation for The Document Foundation's wiki, but would like to do some GitHub stuff too.

I've made a couple of edits to some programs, but all of my merge requests were denied :/

@wilhelmina Nice. I'd say, start small, take a library you often use and understand from the consumer side. Check whether they have open, unresolved issues. Don't lose encouragement if a PR is not accepted, forks can be valuable as well.

And I've noticed it can help quite a lot if you split functionality from your own projects into libraries and publish them for the world to use. Forces you to think about separation of functionality, documentation and usefulness of smaller parts of code.

@bittersweet Thanks for the advice! I'll post back when I have kept my resolutions :)

Why work for free? (sarcasm)