I was involved in a relatively large server mod community, primarily as a dev, but as time went on more and more time was spent moderating the community and managing incoming work.
By getting involved, even without coding anything, you will learn a lot about how the 'core' team operates and communicates. If you are able to support by testing or triaging that can help even more. Once you get an idea of how things work you will probably also find something that you can fix.
By all means, jump into the code as soon as possible, but don't discount the other parts of an open source project.
p.s. Documentation is an area that always benefits the entire project, without requiring much more than a comprehension of the code.
I was involved in a relatively large server mod community, primarily as a dev, but as time went on more and more time was spent moderating the community and managing incoming work.
By getting involved, even without coding anything, you will learn a lot about how the 'core' team operates and communicates. If you are able to support by testing or triaging that can help even more. Once you get an idea of how things work you will probably also find something that you can fix.
By all means, jump into the code as soon as possible, but don't discount the other parts of an open source project.
p.s. Documentation is an area that always benefits the entire project, without requiring much more than a comprehension of the code.