Open Source: Contribute without thinking too much

I’m always using open source software, be it a text editor plugin, an entire server or even an entire operating system. The open source field never felt so strong and united as it is nowadays. Everyone has a github profile, anything you can imagine has a github repo. If god exists, he or she is surely on github (I bet it would be a repo, no a user, but let’s cut out the Matrix theories).
A lot of people are doing something similar to me: using those open source, community driven tools everyday. And when I say a lot of people, I mean A LOT of people.
Some repositories have tens of thousands of stars, and who knows ho many daily clones. Every developer is using and sharing code and general people are using those tools without even knowing. This is simply amazing.
But once in a while, we feel the need to give back. Every developer feels this way sometimes. As a (mostly) PHP dev, I was always thinking “How can I pay back to the community? How can I contribute?”. This is where the problem begins. A gazillion ideas jumping into my head. Nothings seems good enough. I found myself looking at some stuff I was clearly not able to do with the limited amount of free time that I had, planning gigantic projects, writing an entire framework for nothing. But at the end of the day, I ended up contributing to smaller projects from people I’ve never heard of, and the sense of accomplishment was still there.
I know a lot of young developers think this way. But take it easy. You don’t need to make your own operational system (if you could, go for it). But if your goal is to contribute, just do it.
With time, you’ll surely have some things that can be stripped into their own repos, stuff you didn’t create to have something on github, but because they are handy.
I myself had an old script I developed with bash. Something to create nginx servers for local development, restart the stack and stop it. I didn’t create if because it looked like a good idea. I created it because I was typing the same stuff 30 times a day and that annoys me.

With some tweaking I turned this handy script into a repository. It’s just a bash script. It was born out of anger, not love.
Linus didn’t create the Linux kernel to show off his skills. It was useful for him in many levels. Keep that in mind: usefulness is the way to success.
As I said earlier, everything is being updated at github. If you want to help, help useful ideas or share then! You’ll show your skills at the same time. It will be easier to have things to share with the community if you look at what you’re using.
Perhaps you developed a library that connects with some api and could turn it into a package. Perhaps you have this little nifty python script that does some amazing thing. The point is: start from what you have.
If you share what you find useful and I share what I find useful, we’ll both benefit from it.
By the way, here is the script I’ve talked about: https://github.com/caonUlisses/zoo
