I see what you are doing there, @pfaffman. 
That being said, I don’t think you want me cleaning up your code just yet, but I agree that submitting PRs could be a great place to start. First, I need to dig into some of the resources already shared in this thread.
My biggest challenge right now is going to be shifting from my LAMP background to whatever the Discourse stack is referred to. LNPR (Linux, Nginx, Postgres, Ruby/Rails)? Haha.