Hi @Jason_Nutt,
Open source contribution normally begins from something you use (or would like to use). There’s a very broad scope of potential projects, but I assume you have specific interests in terms of tech stack and types of applications or tools to contribute to.
What sort of tech stack and projects are you looking to work with?
If you are looking for a collaborative project to help develop specific skills, I would consider if there are any established projects you are already using that you might be able to contribute to. Almost all of the projects I contribute to or maintain are ones I use, with the exception of occasional PRs that arise from community discussion.
Starting with small changes like improvements to documentation, testing, or trying to reproduce some of the open issues are great ways to become familiar with a project and the maintainer(s). Projects that are more open to contributors will typically have a README and Contributing Guide that will help orient you. For example, see the get-started-readme from my colleague @wan or WildAid’s O-FISH project which uses MongoDB Realm.
If you really aren’t fussed on what sort of project you want to contribute to, there are some tagging conventions on GitHub like help-wanted or good-first-issue. You could search relevant tagged issues with some additional keywords like mongodb and your preferred programming language. GitHub also has a short guide: Finding ways to contribute to open source on GitHub - GitHub Docs.
You can also contribute to MongoDB documentation, drivers, Compass, Server, etc … but typically interest would start from a specific improvement or bug you are looking to address rather than looking through the open list of issues which others have reported.
An important consideration to keep in mind with code contributions to any open source project is that once a maintainer accepts your pull request, they will end up dealing with any bugs or support requests that arise. Adding test coverage and documentation will help reassure maintainers that they are not merging a change which might lead to significantly more support work for them.
Regards,
Stennie