HomeSpan VS Awesome-Embedded

and https://github.com/HomeSpan/HomeSpan

You can check out Homespan. Together with an ESP32 you can mostly hook it up with whatever appliance you want. Some soldering/tinkering might be neccesary though, but it’s really great.

If you have an iPhone or iPad you can even do it through apple's HomeKit using the HomeSpan library for ESP32-Arduino. It's really well documented and that way you don't have to program a new app for your phone in addition to the esp32 code.

Also, for esp32 the situation is much better. As arduino core for esp32 is rtos based, it is possible to simply use espressif hap sdk from arduino corr or directly from bundled RTOS. Esp32 is much faster, SRP, which is the most time consuming, takes a second on it, while it could take up to 20+ seconds on esp8266. There’s also a nice HomeSpan app example for esp32/arduino https://github.com/HomeSpan/HomeSpan. Author calls it “library”, but it is more like a complete app, which can be highly customized and, I suppose, it is also possible to reuse just a necessary parts of it, just like a library.

This massive page of resources has helped me tremendously throughout my embedded learning, that would probably be a good starting point.

I saw a post in this subreddit and found this GitHub that seems wonderful, give it a go, you might just find what you need : https://github.com/nhivp/Awesome-Embedded

Should I focus on a sector mentioned above and learn everything about that one or is it better to have a more general preparation first by broadly following this roadmap: https://github.com/nhivp/Awesome-Embedded ?

If you’re looking for good examples of code in general: https://github.com/nhivp/Awesome-Embedded

Perhaps this list can help you, https://github.com/nhivp/Awesome-Embedded