There are several reasons you might want to contribute to open source software. For me, it was that I wanted to learn in a more useful way than doing programming challenges. So I looked into how I could contribute to open source projects that I use myself.
After contributing for almost two years, I notice that I have learned a lot from my contributions (which has been useful at work), as well as have made friends and have become part of a community.

In this talk I will share my experience with contributing to Cucumber, including an early mistake (merging something that wasn't ready yet) and fixing it with the support of core contributors, and still feeling welcome!
You'll learn how how to find your project and contributions to start with, how to connect with the community to make sure your contributions are useful and the many types of contributions you can make.

Contributing to open source is a way of paying back to the community. In addition, it is a way for you to learn, collaborate and become part of a community. Getting (constructive) feedback on a pull request and collaborating to make things even better is a great feeling!