The assignment is to implement two MapReduce jobs and design a public API for Scalica operations. The first job is to update friendship lists based on tombstone events, where the output should be statements to add or delete user IDs from friendship lists. The second job is to log user interaction data, including IP addresses and HTTP headers, and make it available for analysis pipelines. The third part of the assignment is to design a public RESTful API for two Scalica operations: reading all posts of a user and making a user start following another user.