Get an Arduino starter kit and start hacking on some little project around the house. With a bit of persistence, C/C++ is not so difficult to become productive coming from almost any other language. And with the help of platformio's [1] CLI tooling it makes uploading and debugging your code on chips like the ESP8266 (or ESP32 or Arduino) pretty straight forward. Then of course there are the actual physical pieces of hardware, wires, circuits, components, etc. It's a whole new world in which to learn and break stuff. Good luck!
So much this.
You can tie in to Home Assistant quite easily. You can then make all sorts of things. Buttons to turn things on, screens to show data from Home Assistant, measure things (distance, door open/closed state, humidity, light/dark, weight etc). The sensors are nearly all really inexpensive and seem to be pretty accurate. From knowing nothing to having something functional working takes a few hours. It’s great fun and anything with lights and sound gets kids involved very easily.
Alexa enabled switch to turn on / off a TV using the IR blaster
my boss used 3 of these this to build a smart sprinkler system for his house.