It's challenging to find your first few projects to contribute to.
But here are few ideas though which you can get started ๐
1. Contribute to something that you're already similar with.
Find some tool or framework that you use and invest in learning that, how it actually works and how the codebase is structured.
For instance, if you use Jina Ai, then you can explore their GitHub repo and start contributing.
2. Contribute to your friend's or projects of people within your community.
I recently made a pull request to fix a bug in a project I found interesting, and I'm thinking to further develop it in my fork. This is the PR
3. Contribute to open source community projects.
You can join in communities which are empowering open source and have their own open source projects to contribute to.
EddieHub had a couple of great projects, and you can see how much they are involved in it. It's amazing.
This is their GitHub organization
4. Make your own open source projects.
Finally, you can build your own projects and make it open source. People can review your code and make it better, and you'll also end up networking with a lot of people.
Tl;dr
1) Find an open source project that you actually use and invest in it
2) Contribute to projects that people made (people you know or people who are open to contributions)
3) Join in communities which have their open source projects and get involved
4) Make your own open source projects and ask your community for feedback and help
Here are the communities that I'm part of - link
Important Note
Make sure you check if it is open to contributions before you invest your time in something. A project which is on GitHub doesn't mean it is always open to contributions. Raise an issue and ask.