I'm just a kernel newbie looking at small issues in my free time, but seeing my name in the shortlog feels very rewarding.
Nice, what did you do and how much time did it take? I've been hesitating to contribute but it would be great to read a blog post of someone just starting to contribute to see what it takes! It might be enough to get over the fear.
Probably the most confusing thing when getting started is finding something to work on. There's no real centralized issue tracker/TODO list/ideas list - discussion happens mostly in mailing lists [0][1] for specific topics. If you follow the discussion on YOUR_FAVORITE_TOPIC long enough you should be able to find easy work items, people able to help further, reviewers for your changes etc.
In my case specifically, I found the great people at https://clangbuiltlinux.github.io, which is how I got started.
[0] http://vger.kernel.org/vger-lists.html [1] https://lore.kernel.org/lists.html