Something with a 1..N and an N..M relation in it. I'll do a simple link boomarking where I can put links in a collection (1..N) but links also have many tags and many tags can be assigned to a link (N..M).

After that you know a lot of things:

• How do I deal with relations in the framework
• How do I deal with nested resources

Hope that helps.

For frontend stuff I usually go with some form of responsive UI/menu bar/button.

I think it depends upon what features a particular framework is offering. I made various POC apps on different technologies, depending upon their promises.

For eg.:

• Newsfeed app using Angular to demo two-way binding concept.
• Polyglot persistence app to prove the use of changefeed in RethinkDB.
• Super fast web server to handle more 10K/sec request using Node.js to prove it's I/O handling.
• Google-like search engine to demo ElasticSearch use.

And list goes on and on...

An interesting getting started project other than todo might be creating newsfeed since majority of social networking apps/sites today have some sort of feed to show content to users. Another project that might be useful could be simple login/user profile creation since it is used in almost all applications.

For me, a trello like intro would be great. I always liked to do a better TODO, and trello seems to be the right choice.