You allude to the solution in your last sentence, but I think "find an open source project" is pretty bad advice for someone who is really brand new. Most open source projects have very ad-hoc project management. There is typically a big bucket of stuff that needs to be done, but very little direction on how to decide which things you can and should actually do. More experienced developers can go in and muddle around semi-blindly until they figure out a reasonable starting point, but that's really hard for less experienced people to do. It really takes a mentor willing to do that triage - "maybe this would be a good place for you to start" - but few open source projects seem to be forward-looking enough to provide that level of mentorship.