Hey there,
I have been a hobbyist programmer for quite some years and have a few smaller projects under my belt: mostly smaller GUI applications that have a few classes at maximum, make use of one or two external libraries and are very thoroughly documented and commented.
Since I love the free software movement and philosophy, I wanted to start contributing to projects I like and help them out.
The thing is, the jump from “hobbyist” to “being able to understand super-efficient compact established repos”… seems to be very hard?
Like, looking into some of these projects, I see dozens upon dozens of classes, header files, with most of them being totally oblique to me. They use syntactic constructs I cannot decipher very well because they have been optimized to irrecognizability, sometimes I cannot even find the starting point of a program properly. The code bases are decades old, use half the obscure compiler and language features, and the maintainers seem to be intimately familiar with everything to the point where I don’t even know what’s what or where to start. My projects were usually like four source files or so, not massive repositories with hundreds of scattered files, external configurations, edge cases, factories of factories, and so on.
If I want to change a simple thing like a placement of a button or - god knows! - introduce a new feature, I would not even remotely know where to start.
Is it just an extreme difficulty spike at this point that I have to trial-and-error through, or am I doing anything wrong?
I faced a similar challenge a few years ago; from my own projects to a large policy management system at an insurance company with literally 100s of thousands of source code files.
Of course it was extremely daunting at first, but what definitely helped me most was coming up with a strategy to find code where similar things had already been done.
This is easiest with a good IDE (search for aptly named classes, functions, etc.), and of course then asking somebody more experienced if you found the right bit of code. The last point cannot be overstated; most people love to show off their knowledge. If you come to someone with a question about a specific piece of code, they are usually extremely helpful. And importantly: if you don’t know who to ask, simply ask someone whom to ask! Again, make people show off their knowledge.