You can start with smaller pieces of the app! Like one thing you can do is to try learning a bit of Python and play around by making simple requests to a Lemmy API to print off a list of posts from the front page.
For learning I’d recommend checking out Codecademy. I got my start with programming there like 10 years ago and I feel like I owe a lot to the website. They have fully interactive tutorials and give you a great starting point.
Good luck! :)
I’m not sure if it’s exactly what you need but I know sonarr (shows) and radarr (movies) can scan added media and do upgrades