Contributing to OS

Yesterday I was talking to a friend about participating in an open source project. The project in question was the Ubuntu Artwork Team, since she is very skilled at working with computer images.

I myself have often been thinking about helping out in different open source projects, but until now I have not gotten further than reporting bugs to Gentoo bugzilla when a package somehow seems to be broken working on my system and things like that. I never really got further than being an active user of the open source software I am using. I have often been thinking about getting to learn how to make ebuilds which is a core thing in the Gentoo system. It is quite simple making ebuilds, but I have been taking the time to sit down and learn it and be able to contribute in this way.
Instead I have now started instead trying to learn to write Java code, that might end up being the way I am going to contribute to the open source movement.