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!)
This looks interesting, though I don't agree with the "most candidates cannot write code to simple algorithm" thesis.
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.
I actually think it will make more difference for enterprise users that must put passwords on their devices.
The Touch ID will help people that don't want to put a permanent password on their device, and will increase the BYOD movement, IMHO.
Indeed, storing the state on the server only (still have to figure out what to do with no connectivity), and verifying receipts on the server will mostly get it fixed.
Are you looking for open source projects to join, or do you want ideas for small projects you want to do on your own?
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.
15 exabytes is way more than I'd intuitively guess, but he does make a point in his guesstimations.
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.
From my experience - it does not.
Sometimes people ask me whether I'm foreigner speaking Hebrew, but it rarely happens, and I think it is more related to the pace of how I speak now and less with the accent.
It's a funny thing http://schema.org/ syntax is not there anywhere.
I think sites based on dynamic UGC content (especially media oriented) should seriously consider adding semantic markups.
Since adding them our Google webmaster's tool is much "happier".
We use flask at fusic.com and find it very reliable and easy to work with.
Our peaks have over 1m rpm, and it has never fails us.
We did a huge project migrating from Django, and now we don't have to jump through hoops so much.
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.
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!)