Great that you are a Spacemacs user now and glad that you like my tutorials.

So, could you be more specific about how vim-sexp works? If you want to visual select sexp from symbol and expanding outward, uses expand-region: https://github.com/magnars/expand-region.el. Same for string. Then you can use smartparens: https://github.com/Fuco1/smartparens to wrap around by simply pressing "(". It is all in Spacemacs now, and you can explore further with evil-lisp-state commands, bound to ", k".