Blockchain tech can be a little intimidating. Therefore it's always good to find nice gateway into its realm. I find Steem ecosystem to be very developer friendly thanks to its simplicity. As a web developer, I can reuse technologies I already know in order to create new applications powered by Steem platform. My weapon of choice these days is JavaScript. It's one of the underdogs among programming languages however it went trough some serious evolution in last years. But more on that later.
If you'd like to start fooling around with Steem API and you already know some javascript, I highly recommend official JS API @ https://github.com/steemit/steem-js