A legacy code base has been migrated into a new Spring Boot application. It uses a SQL database, a REST design, and has a pre-packaged AngularJS frontend.
The application is going through its final code review, but serious doubts were raised about the quality of the application. The reviewers recommend a full rewrite of the backend application.
Your task is to identify and fix all flaws in the code. It should be ready to go into production after this. You can ignore the frontend entirely, including breaking its entire functionality fully. Because of this, recommendations also include redesigning the REST endpoints and having properly defined behaviour. This will require rewriting the application fully.
Testing should be done with both unit tests, integration tests, and you testing
the application in practice by running requests against it. Use any of curl,
Postman, Insomnia, or
whichever tool you prefer.
Zip and upload your solution to the folder you downloaded it from on Google Drive. Alternatively, e-mail it back, and we'll take care of the rest. This is only how we do exercises; real-life work would not include uploading code to Drive or e-mailing it around.
Focus only on the backend. You may still update the frontend if you would like, but it will not be evaluated.
If you did not get to finish rewriting the application in time, please make a file with tasks you did not get done. This should improve general improvements about the service. Hand it in alongside your submission. Let this to-do list be as full of information as you can.
In reality, we will have certain scopes provided to us by the business side, or by other teams. This coding exercise doesn't actually have any kind of scope, but let this serve as a scope for your reimplementation, nonetheless.
We need you to provide us with an API for registering in and managing tournaments and participants ("players" from hereon out).
A tournament is some kind of event or challenge going on which has an ID, a name, and some kind of reward prize. All prizes will be in EUR to begin with, but we may want to expand to other markets with other currencies later on.
A player will have an ID and a name. They may register to tournaments; store this however you want, so long as we can get all players in a tournament somehow.
While we often don't have real deadlines in practice, you may be given one for
the sake of this exercise. See the top part of the Scope section for more
info on how to handle unfinished tasks.
You are allowed to use any dependencies you would like, so long as they are not malicious. Feel free to add or remove them as you please, including annotation processors and nullness/contract annotation libraries. We want you to show how you would ideally write an application with your current knowledge.
Our only ask is that you keep the language as Java. Kotlin, Scala, and any other JVM-based programming languages are not in scope for this exercise. We encourage you to use Java 11 or newer; Java 11 is the current default.
You're always welcome to use online material to get help. Make sure you evaluate good sources like you would on the job, and give proper attribution. If you can't find what you need online, please do reach out to us.
If you use Linux or macOS:
- Open a terminal.
- Run
./mvnw spring-boot:run.- If this fails, ensure it is actually executable and retry:
chmod +x ./mvnw. - If it still fails for reasons you cannot figure out, please contact us.
- If this fails, ensure it is actually executable and retry:
- Head to http://localhost:8080 to see the frontend.
If you use Windows:
- Open a Windows Terminal, Command Shell, or PowerShell.
- Run
.\mvnw.cmd spring-boot:run.- If it fails for reasons you cannot figure out, please contact us.
- Head to http://localhost:8080 to see the frontend.
NOTE: You will need Java 11 (or newer) set up and in use for this to work.