I made a patch for Mozilla, and you can do it too
I've been working with new contributors for some years now. Here are some advices:<p>- find a mentor. It will helps a lot (use <a href="http://www.joshmatthews.net/bugsahoy/);" rel="nofollow">http://www.joshmatthews.net/bugsahoy/);</a>
- for the first bugs, writing code is not usually the hard part. Understanding bugzilla and writing tests are;
- ask for a commit access level 1 early to have access to the try servers (to run the tests);
- finish what you start. Bug is fixed when it lands, not when a patch is attached;
- mozilla hackers are nice people, ask questions on IRC. There's no stupid questions (we all started from zero too);<p>Everything will get much easier after the first bug fix. And motivation grows a lot once you have finally landed some code :)