AskSteemit: Do you know where I can find resources/examples of how to interact with Steem blockchain programmatically?

As an exercise I am trying to create a bot for Steem which detects spam comments (a kind of Hive account@steemcleaners) but also which is commenting back and tries to explain the spammer why is it wrong to do that, just as Hive account@steemitboard is commenting when people make an achievement. For this I have a few questions:

1. In what environment should this bot run? Is it enough to make it a JavaScript or should it be some server-side application?

2. Do you have any resources on how to setup the project and interact with the blockchain, like working examples?

I have tried to learn these things form the developers portal but the Example section contains only one example on how to post an article. I was able to run it so it was complete enough, but I steel don't feel able to query the blockchain to iterate through posts and a post's comments because the API References does not contain examples of that or I was not able to find them.

Thank you very much and have a wonderful Christmas!