I feel like a really important step is missing between steps 2 and 3: open an issue about the changes you'd like to make, and get feedback from the project maintainers. Unless you are just fixing an extremely obvious and simple bug, it is a really bad idea to just write up a pull request without getting an "I'd consider merging that" from a maintainer.<p>There are plenty of reasons that a pull request might get rejected. Perhaps a maintainer has already written some similar code and just hasn't merged it into a public branch. Maybe the approach you took isn't in line with the maintainer's vision. Maybe they just simply don't want to add the feature you want.<p>Randomly sending pull requests out of the blue is a good way to waste time and become frustrated. It's not very fun to write a bunch of code and have the maintainer just drop it on the floor.