I've been publishing a bit of code recently and I'm loving it! My current job allows me to pick and choose the libraries and tools I use, and as such I've been spending plenty of time analysing them, making good use of them and where github's involved, giving back where I could. In the past I've submitted a couple of patches through bug trackers, but in the last couple of months, I've sent half a dozen, albeit minor pull requests to projects I use:

• gocardless/gocardless-php
• composer/composer
• fabpot/Sismo
• Behat/Behat
• Behat/Behat
• Behat/Behat-docs

I've also started publishing more of my own work:

• davedevelopment/housey - Early stages of a A/Bingo port to PHP
• davedevelopment/stiphle - A simple PHP library for throttling things
• davedevelopment/sismo-geckoboard-notifier
  • a Sismo notifier for Geckoboard, written to (possibly) submit to Ibuilding's latest challenge
• Audio notifier for Sismo (gist) - A really simple notifier that I use, along with Super Mario sounds effects :)

I think I've got past the point of caring too much about what other people might think about my work and standards like PSR0 and tools like composer have made it easier for me to create re-usable components that people may actually use. The two libraries I mentioned above published aren't watched and haven't been forked yet, but someone may find them useful one day! One of my other projects phpmig has seen some use and has had contributions from others.

The next step is to get my teeth in to something a bit more involved, I've got my eye on a particular issue in composer, but I'm need to speak to the core devs to get some guidelines on how to proceed, i.e. how much refactoring I can do without compromising the 1.0.0 release.

In conclusion, Github makes it so easy, why aren't you contributing?