Not all support of oss is code related. Updating documentation is a really important part too but programmers are generally bad at it.
Translating documentation to other languages too.

First: Great that you’re motivated to learn this stuff! When it comes to programmers I’ve worked with, usually the best ones are those who learned programming to do something for FOSS or wanted to create a thing themselves.

Second: If you’re planning on university, an IT degree doesn’t hurt. You’ll learn a lot of stuff that -can- be useful. At the same time you don’t need one.

Practically though, start learning a programming language that is relevant to one of the projects you care about. If you want to learn programming in general, start with Python for a very easy introduction to the basics. If you want to learn more about how computer work (you should), learn C. For learning programming, I recommend books instead of websites, especially if you learn a system level language like C.

Once you’ve learned a bit of programming - apply it! Go through the bugtracker of the software you use, and find a bug someone has already solved. Read what the bug was about, then read what changes were made and understand why that fixed the bug. The most important practical skills for a programmer are reading other people’s code (especially for what you want to do) and debugging. Remember that the most common question a programmer asks is not “how do I do this” but “how does this work?” Another common one is: “WHY does this work?”

But you may also be able to contribute without programming. Many of the software you use requires people who understand how the operating system works to configure it, package the software, and help others like you to solve problems. All of this can be done without much understanding of programming if you spend some time to get familiar with the manual of your software and how the software interfaces with your operating system.

Good luck!

How can I teach myself how to offer small improvements to the projects I use?

Programming in general?

Probably more that if you want to work on graphics software, you need to understand graphics programming?

That’s unfortunately very difficult. I know of no good way to do that. With specification based software, you can at least read the specification or related standard and then it flows from that how it should work. With programs that server a different, specific use case, there is a manual, and flow to things and then “things stick out”.

If there are issues, you just read a bunch of issues and read the code that they are about and get a feeling for why the issue is an issue and why the code is the way that it is.

I remember one thing I helped with for a short while, didn’t use the python “with” file writing dialogue, because the file they were writing was massive and opening it in one place, then doing a bunch of functions that wrote and appended to the file and then closing it somewhere else, was the best solution, even though it looked unclean at first.

Which projects?

Can you look at the source code in the repos and make any sense of it?

Are there open issues connected to the repo, that you think you could make some headway with?

If you have 0 experience writing code, I think contributing to an existing project isn’t a good way to start. Better to text a textbook and work through some exercises, and do a few small projects of your own, before trying to join an existing team where as a total newbie, you’ll be a burden. Note that “small project of your own” can involve forking something that exists and making your own changes or additions. That doesn’t require much attention from other people.

Then, contribute once you feel you are ready to contribute.

If you really want to contribute to some projects, the first step would be to take a course in that project’s programming language. There are many decent free courses on YouTube, and even more fantastic courses for very cheap on websites like Udemy or Skillshare.

Next, you’d probably want to keep learning the language (e.g., by solving LeetCode challenges), read more about programming and software development in general, as well as check out another course or a tutorial about the specific frameworks/libraries or even just paradigms that the project works with.

A good starting point is FreeCodeCamp on YouTube. Courses there are excellent for the proce of 0€. If you have difficulties with anything - you can always ask a chatbot. If you opt for courses on something like Udemy - you can always just ask the instructor and they’ll usually respond within 2 hours, timezone permitting.

Echoing that the best place to start is to get a handle on programming as a concept. Not because we’re trying to gatekeep the good stuff behind the scary programmer voodoo, but because otherwise you’re basically attempting to edit a book in a language you don’t speak (and the reader is very picky about grammar).

That said, you can absolutely teach yourself to code! Hell, if you figured out self hosting I’m willing to bet you’ve probably already got a handful of transferable skills.

In the interest of disclosure, I learned programming as part of my degree (took a Java class as a resume booster my first semester and ended realizing that I preferred coding to calculus and switched my major), so I’m not exactly a wealth of knowledge in the self study department. However I would recommend a course that has labs/ challenges/ projects to practice what your learning. Everyone learns differently, but I’ve personally found that I picked up programming concepts better when I got hands-on and applied them in my assignments.

The programmer’s open secret is that generally once you know one programming language, it’s pretty easy to pick up another. For example, Java and Python might write them in different ways, but at the end of the day a loop is a loop and as long as you know you need to repeat some code until some condition is met, it’s perfectly acceptable to Google “loop in Python” or “[Java concept] in Python”. In other words, it doesn’t super matter which language you start with; just pick something and stick with it (bonus points if you can turn around and tinker with an OSS app with what you’re learning).

It depends on the project. Often there’s a “Contributing” page on its website or a file named CONTRIBUTING.md or similar in the source tree. Start from reading it. Sometimes information there is aimed at experienced developers, but sometimes it is very friendly for beginners.

Train yourself on the tech and you’ll be able to contribute more. Also, you are contributing greatly already by making posts like this.

Self taught programmer here. If your goal is to contribute code. Get the project’s code, learn how to run it. Go pick an issue, great if it has a first time contributor tag or something. Try to fix it. If someone fixes it before you, now you can compare fixes. Sounds simple? It kind of is, but there are some side quests involved. This processes will force you to learn the bare minimum to get the task done. Your solution will most likely be shit but that’s great, you can only get better. Programming is less about knowing how to do something and more about figuring it out as you go. Google, chatbot/llm, read the docs, ask others. Edit: Forgot something important: Be open to critique, programming is a craft and there is a lot to learn. Being bad at it is a given for most. Also most programmers are kinda bad at communicating so they may sound harsher than they are.

I’m going to echo what others have said here but hopefully clarify it somewhat. For most FOSS projects you can contribute by code, documentation, writing/reviewing bug reports, or other project management tasks. The projects probably have a “Contributing” section on their website that will help you get started and might even have an “easy tasks” or “good for beginners” section.

If you’re primarily interested in contributing by writing code, then you need to learn to code. Pick a language that a project you care about is written in and find the beginners tutorials.

You going to want to learn the basic tools the project uses even if you’re not writing code just so you can interact with the project’s community, so probably git, their bug tracker, and whatever they use for documentation and translation.

And don’t be surprised if it takes a while to get that first contribution in. FOSS developers tend to become grumpy with time and generally have high standards, and due to the massive amount of LLM slop being thrown their way these last few years have often become even more so. But your work will be appreciated if you stick with it.

Just a note to say that devs of large, well established projects are always receptive to donations. A lot of these projects have demo sites, which cost money. So, if you can’t contribute to the code side of the project, a few $$ here and there is always welcome in my experience.