everytime I go there, the tickets are already assigned.

It seems so ! They suggest others ideas on the contributing page [0] : - Improve the documentation or write unit tests. - Triage tickets and review patches created by other users.

I also imagine that reaching committers through irc will bring some ideas to work on.

[0] https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/internals/contributing...

I see a lot of projects recommend triaging tickets or writing unit tests, but those both seem to be areas that require substantial knowledge about the state of a project, so as a newbie they don't feel accessible.

It would be cool to see lists of how you can triage (e.g. encouraging people to help reproduce) or add tests (e.g. areas that could use more tests).

Possible I'm unusual, but I actually like writing documentation as a way to learn a new codebase.

When I started a new job earlier this year I actually jumped at the chance to grab some documentation tickets, because it meant I had to not just halfheartedly skim through the relevant code but actually read it in detail and understand what was going on.

(and, of course, I ended up finding a bug)

The Django doc does that, actually they encourage newbies to triage and give pointers