2ndhandband wrote:A lot of it might depend on how willing present devs are to mentor novices. I've contacted several projects with offers to help in any way possible, but I've been shrugged off because I'm just learning C++. If a project would take me on and give me little tasks to do while I build my skills and point me in the right direction when I screw up or get lost, I could probably be a serious contributor within a year or two.

The best way to start is finding something you're interested in. That could be a bug, or a new feature in some application you use on a regular basis and you'd like to have (fixed). When you found something, just start working -- if you need help, ask in #kde-devel or in the project's IRC channel, or on the project mailing list if nobody is online in IRC. If you manage to come up with a working patch, put that on reviewboard.kde.org to get it upstreamed.

When you submitted a few good patches and are still interested in contributing more, you can also apply for a KDE developer account, so you get write access to the repositories.

Source code for almost all KDE projects can be found on projects.kde.org.