I write scrapers and consume APIs all the time. I just wrote one that traverses certain categories of Craigslist, normalizes the data, turns it into some structured PHP datatypes, and then downloads all the content locally including images, attaches them into Drupal nodes (one node per ad, and dupe checking, so I do not process duplicates)
I have been doing this kind of stuff for way too long. My code style is extremely efficient, easy enough to read, and would be in procedural, simple PHP and MySQL.
I know various libraries and techniques to use depending on the type of data I am working with to get the results I want.
I live in the US, I speak English. I work as a sysadmin/PHP developer for my day job.