OSS Contributions

Improve Coding - Not only good for practice programming skills, but to also learn and gain feedback from more accomplished programmers.
Gain Early Experience - Become better at reading code produced by others, finding and fixing bugs, and adding code into the main repository.
Increase Community and Peer Recognition - Recognition from members of the OSS community can be encouraging and motivating to continue improving our skills and to create new opportunities.
Greater Job Prospects - It can also improve our job and career prospects.
Improve Software on a User and Business Level - Contributing can also resonate on a business level. If a company is using an open-source software and would like to make some changes or add new features, could potentially turn into a good opportunity for us.

First Timers Only is a site that provides a list of resources for developers that have never contributed to an open source project before.

GitHub also has pretty good options to learn how to contribute to open source and launch a new project.