We're Running a Contest — Refactor to Hexagonal Architecture and Win a Book
I just published a full tutorial on Hexagonal Architecture in Spring Boot, and we're running a contest alongside it.
The prize is "Get Your Hands Dirty on Clean Architecture" by Tom Hombergs as an ebook — the book that popularized this exact pattern in the Java world.
What the video covers
In Episode 1 of my Spring Boot series I showed a basic api/domain/infrastructure structure. This episode takes it further — proper Ports & Adapters, an explicit application layer, and the thing that makes it all worth it: business logic tests that run in 50 milliseconds instead of 45 seconds.
The key insight the video builds toward: Spring's dependency injection is already the hexagonal mechanism. When your controller injects RegisterUser and Spring provides RegisterUserService — that IS ports and adapters. You just need to be intentional about which interfaces go where.
→ [Watch the full episode here: youtube link]
The contest
Fork the repo, refactor the user and order packages to Hexagonal Architecture, open a Merge Request, and drop the link in the YouTube comments.
Three things that make a valid submission: ports use business names (loadUser not findById), the domain package has zero Spring annotations, and at least one test runs without @SpringBootTest.
One random winner from all valid submissions gets the ebook.
Deadline: [02.04.2026]
Repo: GitLab link
Part of an ongoing Spring Boot + DDD series. Next up: Value Objects.
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