Explain how to become an active open source contributor like I'm Five

Hello, I've been part of open source projects for 4 years now, and I thought I could give you some tips:

First of all I suggest you to read about the open source way of thinking. Of course the coding part is the main part, but understanding the ideology will probably give you new perspectives and ideas.

Second, GITHUB!! Github is full of open projects waiting for help, and is easy to use in both linux and windows... I suggest you to use linux tho.

Third, look for open source events in your city. They might gather around your place once or twice a month and organize stuff. At university they might know more about it... If not you can take a look at meetup or similar. Collaborate with open source projects can be done online, but going to these kind of meetings help knowing more about projects and even contribute to your community.

Good luck with it!

If there's nothing you want to start on your own, you could look more closely at the libraries or dependencies you rely on (including Laravel itself). Do any of them seem like they do something you'd be interested in learning more about? Look them up and see if there's an easy way to contribute. Many actively developed projects have issue trackers where you can find bugs that need fixing, and a few of them will tag "good first issue" or some such. Or if you have an idea for a new feature you'd like to use, you could look into implementing it. If there is an issue tracker it's generally a good idea to open an issue to discuss your idea with the maintainers before attempting anything major.

Not an exact explanation on how to begin contributing. But check out this link from free code camps readme on GitHub. It has a ton of resources to help you get started in the right direction. how-to-contribute-to-open-source

Look for projects that look cool, look at their issues and try to handle them