It was intimidating for me, being my first contribution to such a large-scale, widely-used project - but the team was absolutely wonderful to work with and guided me through the process, including multiple PR's and rounds of reviews.
The Renovate project has served as an example of how I want to structure and operate my own open source projects. On more than one occasion I've checked to see "how does Renovate [the project] handle this?"...
Big shout out to Michael Kriese (viceice)[1], the dude is an absolute machine. I don't know how he does what he does.
Also a huge shout out to Ryhs Arkins (rarkins)[2], creator of Renovate and a man with unlimited patience for my rookie questions.
Lastly, big shout out to HonkingGoose[3] (who's name we may never know), for turning my gibberish into proper documentation. What a legend.
Every one of my new projects uses Renovate. Not having to worry about monitoring dependencies, manually bump them, etc. is a great thing even for small codebases. I only have to deal with dependencies when something fails and Renovate tags me on the PR - pretty cool. I highly recommend checking it out of you have not done so before.
[1] https://github.com/viceice