Leave your bubble.<p>There is almost certainly some volunteer group in your area that could use an extra pair of hands. You might be tempted early on to offer suggestions to improve their efforts through better software; don't. Instead, just watch, ask, listen, and learn. Once you've got enough experience to be confident that you understand end-to-end how everything works in whatever group you volunteer for, you'll probably know the right place to apply your skills as a developer (which very well may just consist of, "um, you need automated backups").<p>Keep in mind that their priorities are different from yours. Things that you would probably consider essential or best practices are, for them, distractions and nuisances and costs to which they're super sensitive: updates, security, anything that's new and requires effort to learn.<p>Software developers tend to see themselves as "systems thinkers", and think they can always improve any given thing by swooping in and applying some new software to it. That is often not actually the case, but they don't get their hands dirty enough and stick around long enough to realize it.