A lot of web developer side projects I see are either open source libraries, or very front end heavy things that focus mostly on visual design and interaction.<p>What are some side projects that you've built, where the element that made it special was on the back end?
I work on geocoding. There is a frontend component both HTML and JSON/XML/GeoJSON but the bulk of the project is either in the database design, query logic or import pipelines. It's also non-trivial to install because with medium grade hardware (let's say a laptop) the data crunching will put all cores of the CPU to 100% for a week.