> I am a CS student, three years away from being a software engineer.
Three years away from having a degree. If you routinely do software engineering, you're a software engineering (possibly s/engineer/develop/ for a similar claim.)
> Since last year, I began reading the code of popular open source projects I use in order to determine the source of a problem I was having, and a lot of those times ended up as bug reports.
You are a saint! I would _love_ for people to read through my code looking for bugs and oddities.
Just remember that some FOSS projects are coded well, while others are coded horrendously.
> I now take the time to explain my whole reasoning into finding the bug and linking appropriate code snippets, but I'm still a bit afraid to start a PR on my own to fix it.
>
> Since I did so on popular projects, with lots of issues/PR about half of them got ignored, or responded to a year later saying "not applicable to latest version".
If you are considering writing a PR, get in touch with developers in a chatroom, or even over email, to coordinate this. They are likely to respond favorably to offers of PRs, and tell you things like "Don't do it now, we have a refactor coming up" or "base yourself off of this branch". And even if they say "not interested, don't bother" - you've still gotten useful information from them.
Three years away from having a degree. If you routinely do software engineering, you're a software engineering (possibly s/engineer/develop/ for a similar claim.)
> Since last year, I began reading the code of popular open source projects I use in order to determine the source of a problem I was having, and a lot of those times ended up as bug reports.
You are a saint! I would _love_ for people to read through my code looking for bugs and oddities.
Just remember that some FOSS projects are coded well, while others are coded horrendously.
> I now take the time to explain my whole reasoning into finding the bug and linking appropriate code snippets, but I'm still a bit afraid to start a PR on my own to fix it. > > Since I did so on popular projects, with lots of issues/PR about half of them got ignored, or responded to a year later saying "not applicable to latest version".
If you are considering writing a PR, get in touch with developers in a chatroom, or even over email, to coordinate this. They are likely to respond favorably to offers of PRs, and tell you things like "Don't do it now, we have a refactor coming up" or "base yourself off of this branch". And even if they say "not interested, don't bother" - you've still gotten useful information from them.