Blender is a large and complex codebase. How would someone from the outside even start contributing to it? And then once you start, how does it feel like?
As a concrete example, Aras will outline his journey how to started to contribute to Blender's video sequence editor. Without knowing anything about videos, sequences or editors before that, of course! How do you learn about the whole domain, existing codebase and design decisions behind it, and then how do you proceed with (hopefully!) improving it.
Aras started tinkering with computer graphics programming sometime around 1996. He has worked at several small game companies, a bit in the demoscene, and on the Unity game engine between 2006 and 2021. Since 2022 he maintains Blender's OBJ, STL and PLY importers/exporters, and since late 2023 is working on various Video Sequence Editor improvements and optimizations.