liranz
Too many startups go over to Hadoop/no-sql solutions before the overhead is indeed justified. SQL for most of the data with a bit of Redis and numpy for background processing will take you much further than most people assume.
It's fun to think you must have DynamoDB, Hadoop or a Cassandra backend, but in real life -- you better invest in more features (or analytics!)
I interview A LOT. Almost 100% of the candidates I receive cover the basic programming abilities. The real problem is that they don't know how to THINK.
I talk with them 20 min on the phone when they have to present a problem they had and how they solved it. Then I try to find out what they find interesting.
Giving a mini project is a good idea, but it does not scale well, and still requires a lot of resources top candidates will just not be willing to invest.
Are you looking for pass-time projects, or do you want to improve your career path?
Assuming hobbies: I'm sure you have a small blog you can create FE or BE to, if you prefer 'real world' or robotics projects you should get Arduino and Raspberry PI and play with it. You can start making your home/condo 'smarer' by integrating physical stuff to it. Try programming an 'arcade' game to a platform you like (web, iOS, Android, etc). Playing with 3D graphics is always fun, learn about 3D libraries and techniques like ray tracing and try to recreate your real world. If you prefer mathematics, read about Bayesian distributions, and this about how you'd make a better recommendation system to ranking system to a site you're using.
This is quite a difficult question without knowing you. My biggest problem is aways picking out what to do with my non-existent free time :)
Most important -- find something that you really like doing and care about, or you'll abandon it quickly.
Good luck, and enjoy!
It makes you wonder what is the capacity of S3. Does Amazon reveal this number? In any case, Amazon will still have much more storage capacity between EBS, CloudFront caching, and DynamoDBs.
Since adding them our Google webmaster's tool is much "happier".
I think flask has a front page that discourages newcomers, as it does not look as serious as Django, and gives the feeling that is it not mature enough, or documented. I tried convincing a new startup to use it and failed for those reasons.