Looking to become a new regular contributor

[jamesaorson@gmail.com]

I have, for a long time, been looking for a meaningfully project to create, but I’ve come to realize that this is seemingly what everyone is doing, and instead I have decided it would be more helpful to others to work on an existing and well respected tool (like emacs).

On top of that, it will work to humble me as I read the code of RMS and others before me who made and are still making emacs what it is today.

I intend to devote the great majority of my leisure programming time to emacs development, and see how that goes after a few years. I have a stable job and don’t see this as just some resume fodder, but just want to continue to improve and start to also contribute.

I started using emacs only about 3 months ago, and I fell in love. I spent the greater part of those 3 months customizing emacs and using it as my entire interface for doing my grad school work, as a means of forcing myself to learn emacs. I have some fresh pain points as someone who came in with effectively zero background about emacs and some things I’d like to explore myself.

Before I pursue those things myself, what are the best ways to get involved in emacs at the current moment? I know I can look at the open TODOs and bugs for emacs today and I will definitely do so, but what is most likely to actually provide some benefit right now? Say there was some large effort being worked on that EVERYTHING else is sort of being tabled for. I would not want to run off and do something contradictory to that work, etc.