Hi there,
Must be going around, Read the threads , lots of folks doing it.
The BLE examples have Both Central and Peripheral in there.
that should get you going. Oh’ and YES you must use Arduino IDE.
You could take a week and learn the Nrf SDK, then another week if your smart to learn the ESP-IDF and if your able to move between the two, then that could work for you. YMMV
HTH
GL 
PJ
ps. the arduino IDE, it would take about an hour BTW to do that including testing.