This bit from the developer spotlight (with John Cai):

What is your advice for people who want to start Git development? Where and how should they start?

It can definitely be intimidating since the codebase is so storied and technically deep. My suggestion is to just dive in and get started with something small – whether that be a documentation improvement or a code cleanup marked with TODO. Also, keep an eye out for bug reports on the mailing list. Fixing bugs also gives you experience with different parts of the code base.

Part of my intimidation is not knowing how people on the mailing list would respond to my contributions. Experiencing how helpful people were, and the overall warmth of the community removed a lot of the emotional barrier of contributing.

Also, it’s easy to read into tone in text-only communication, but the mailing list is full of people who genuinely want to help. Don’t let the fear prevent you from contributing! You’ll learn incrementally each time you send something to the list.

I think of Git as mostly a tool that has reached stability, but there is still quite a bit of development going on at parts of the code base that doesn’t necessarily impact us, developers.