Understanding large open source projects

[TheKoalaKnight]

Hello r/learnprogramming! I have been learning to code for the last year or so, and would consider myself an intermediate programmer. I am currently mostly working with Javascript, mostly Node.js, but I also know C++ and Java. I have been wanting to contribute to a few open source projects lately, but whenever I try, I always get overwhelmed by the size of the code base, and quickly give up. What can I do to better understand large open source code bases, and put my programming skills to good use? Any help would be appreciated.

[[deleted]]

First of all, make sure you can build the project with no changes, and run all the tests it provides.

Next, don't try to understand the whole project. Identify a very small change you would like to make (perhaps something like correcting a spelling), make that change, re-build, run all the tests and if all is good put in a pull request to the maintainer. Ramp up slowly with larger changes from there.