Beautiful is so hard to define, there's no real answer to this question. Your best advice to follow what Nat says in the post you linked:
- Download the source code to the program you want to change
- Untar it on your hard drive
- Get it to build and run
- Open the source code in an editor
- Find the part of the code that you need to change to make the program do what you want it to do
- Make the changes you need to make to the code and test it to make sure it works
- Run the diff -u command and email the output to the mailing list
There is no point looking for beautiful code. Just look at and fix bugs in projects that you use (Django & Twisted might be good candidates).
