being able to reproduce crashes or bugs then documenting will help a lot.

i just dont have the time to decipher vague tickets from users.

take a look at open issues and see if you can reproduce them.

The way I help, as a Sysadmin, is primarily by using foss software in my job and feeding back with bug reports, issues and so on. I’ve raised several hundred issues on Github this way, and try to do them concisely, accurately and with as much relevant information as I can.

Even without development skills, you can still contribute by helping develop and maintain good documentation for your favourite projects or helping with testing and bug reporting.

As a ‘last resort’ if you don’t find any technical tasks in the projects you’d like to contribute to, there’s also plenty of other ways to help:

• Provide new translations into foreign languages
• Create detailed bug reports
• Do in-depth tests of new beta versions or nightly builds
• Provide a download mirror for the software or seed it via torrent
• Donate money to the core maintainers
• Improve the documentation
• Create (video) tutorials to improve the start for other users and make the software known to a broader audience
• Register in forums and help other users with their issues

Or simply ask the maintainers how you might contribute in a meaningful way. I’m sure they’ll appreciate your offer!

While I don’t know what exactly you mean by sysadmin, it sounds to me as if you’d be better at setting up (and maintaining) CI/CD than most normal developers and that’s something that’d be very valuable to lots of projects out there.

You could offer to help them run their infrastructure. For example, the cloud engineering position at Lemmy.world

Build something that you want. Find that niche that isn’t well served by existing projects and fill the void. Either by making something entirely new or adding a feature to something already out there.