I would like to start a project which would have these capabilities, on a headless RaspberryPi (or ubuntu-based) device.

Accumulate list of all devices in my account (lights are the primary device-type of interest)

Accumulate history of times devices turn on and turn off (either by querying each device, or [preferably] by being notified when device status changes, and acting on that notification)

Using the above as a reference, implement a smart “away” mode that will operate the lights similarly to the historic way they’ve been operated while person is not away. This would likely be a series of processes run by a cron process or similar.

The above histories would ideally be stored in my own mysql database.

So this skill (if that’s the right term) is not something that would necessarily be available to the public, rather it is an effort to implement my own “smart away mode” for my own home.

Maybe this is a pipe dream, but it’s what I have in mind. My initial problem is that I cannot seem to find good resources that discuss how to get started with such a project. Amazon’s developer console seems to be geared toward people who already have knowledge of what they’re doing and how to do it. The best help I have found so far (https://www.ionos.com/digitalguide/server/configuration/raspberry-pi-alexa/) seems to be out of date, or maybe it just leaves a lot to the imagination.

If this is not the right place for this non-technical question, can you point me to the right place?