Conversation

we always used to tell newbie foss devs "just scratch an itch!" -- find something that bothered them in the software they used and try to fix it

this *sounds* like good advice (it's nicely self-motivating) but it's often fraught in practice because the things that bug you have often been open in the bug tracker for 20 years with 200 duplicated bug reports merged into them

sometimes if nobody's scratched that itch yet it's because it's *hard to reach*

of course, other times nobody looked ;)