An artist's depiction of an Extended Unit Death
What's something someone could learn to do to help you with coding?
Right now, just PHP, HTML/CSS, and JavaScript would suffice for minor contributions. More specifically, we're looking at utilizing WebSockets, and since SEN runs on PHP, the most sensible option seems to be Ratchet. This would require a significant overhaul of our JavaScript and server responses, but it would be a major gain in terms of performance.
We also need to move the frontend to source control, though I haven't heard much on that front. Regardless, having basic knowledge of Git may be useful in the future if we ever move away from FTP hell. There is very little consideration in the works for setting up environments, so if you have any build engineering or continuous integration experience, that would be welcomed.
Another point that isn't oft discussed behind the scenes is the database. As you may know from the many errors from days past, we use MySql, and more than likely in an ineffective manner. I suspect we're lacking or misusing indexes in many areas (we didn't even utilize any full text searching until recently), but I personally don't have access to the database end (nor do I particularly want it, to be honest). Our data access layer is non-existent, and while we sanitize our queries I don't recall if we're actually using prepared statements. Making CRUD sprocs would probably give us a performance gain, even if it's the wrong way to solve the problem.
More ambitiously, if we can get Node on the server and utilize some useful packages like Gulp and Bower, it would really help manage easily automated tasks like minifying files (which we currently manage manually). Then we could even use a CSS language like Sass.
Our JavaScript would be a lot cleaner if we used a proper SPA framework like AngularJS, so if you want to learn that, feel free. However that's more of a Pipedream than something you should anticipate.
An issue we had after v6 launched was too many cooks (people overwriting each other's changes), so I can imagine Devourer being hesitant on pulling in more developers, at least before source control is in place. But if you're interested in contributing Someday(TM), those would be the areas to hit.
TL;DR: PHP, MySql, JavaScript, Ratchet, Git, JSON.