I'm looking forward to contributing to the Bitcoin-core project. And I also found some good first issues on the Github, but I'm having a hard time downloading the entire node on my laptop (for testing and all). So, is there anything I can do here?
For testing, you can use "
Regtest" which can be set-up in minutes and mine blocks in seconds.
You can read more about it in the developer reference's "
Testing Application" page:
developer.bitcoin.org/examples/testing.html