First Idea: Peer-to-peer chat webapp

This app allows two(or more) people to instantly and directly connect with each other and exchange messages without any third party authorization. It operates completely on a peer-to-peer network, established among the users. This solves the privacy and tracking concerns of users who want to have a personal chat with others without worrying about their data being watched and sniffed. The mechanism is fairly simple: the user can create a meeting, and anyone with the url can join the meeting without any hassle of logging in/authorization. 

Second Idea: Onion routing through an overlay network

Using the already existing IP address as identifier to build a peer-to-peer overlay network.  But instead of naked requests to the server, I want to wrap the request with some layer of protection so that it ensures the data being safe and unsniffed. I want to build a software on the client side that handles data encapsulation and identification in order to join the network. 

Third Idea: Stocks movement based on Social media

This is a AWS Lambda Serverless service that makes requests to Twitter tracking the frequency/occurrences of a stock name being mentioned and how it correlates to its movement in the stock market. The technology that could be used are a couple of Python scripts that make requests and analyze the data, possibly graphing or comparing with the closing price of a given stock. This does not attempt to predict a price in the future, but simply to see if there is correlation between a price movement versus the frequency of its name being mentioned in the social media. 

UPDATE: After some talks with Charlie, the first two ideas can be combined as one. The first two would require more work and harder to iterate but a great source for acquiring the fundamentals of networks. The last one can be a great place to learn about AWS and their services, which is essential in its own right.

Fourth Idea

In the internship this summer, I had many good experience coding and dealing with webservers. But I had one bad experience: I had to web-scrape information for a week. It was a necessary job since we had to gather data for research purpose. But it was gnawing to say the least. At the time I just wish there was better web-scraping technology out there to help me deal with that nightmare. 

I was able to write some software using some library but that did not make my life any less miserable. So I am thinking, maybe I want to make a web-scraper that is more general yet deal with information on a higher level. It can deal with almost any kind of information and any type of communication – whether it is static or ajax at load. And it can gather the common type of information that people search for: name, phone number, email, statistics, etc.