I go through the Cassandra jira weekly and I notice a number of tickets which appear to be clear issues or requests for simple metrics.
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-12626 https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-12330 I also have a few jira issues (opinion) would be simple to triage and merge. Getting things merged is the primary pathway to meritocracy in the ASF. Across some other ASF projects I have seen that when the number of small patches becomes larger that bodies to review them. It can result and chick and egg scenario where reviewers feel overburdened, but the pathway to removing this burden is promoting contributors to committers. My suggestion: Assemble a low-hanging-fruit-crew. This crew would be armed general support for small commits, logging, metrics, test coverage, things static analysis reveals etc. They would have a reasonable goal like "get 2 lhf merged a day/week/whatever". If the process is successful, in a few months there would hopefully be 1-2 committers graduated who would naturally wish to move into low hanging fruit duties. Thoughts?