After you get a reputation for good bug reports and/or useful bug triage, then you can get permissions to edit bug reports. As to how to become a good enough developer... that's tough. Spending some time writing programs in C would be good practice. Even spending some time writing assembly would be useful... you want to become fluent in the idea that a computer is a program counter, registers, and a big array of memory. At which point pointers make sense. People who have only programmed in Python or the like are forever going to be confused by C memory management...
