2007-04-01
We really appreciate that some of you mention the community, like exams you passed and belts you earned on your blogs and websites. (We know who you are from our site stats ;-)) Did you know that you could add a "Congratulations" box too? With it you can show your appreciation to fellow users or those in your country. It's super EZ: just a few lines of Javascript. All of the details are HERE...
2007-03-27
 Find out!
Start by training with the XML Core Basic exam...
The competition starts Friday, 30 March, 09:00 GMT.
Registration for the XML Core Basic competition is open, so sign up!
Don't forget to check out the auctions, there's probably a book in there that you may want!
2007-03-20
Last week we went to the UK to offer the JavaBlackBelt Challenge at QCon and Sun Tech Days. We're proud to say that we had over 200 challengers. We kindly thank the organizers for inviting us to be there and for making us feel extra welcome: Mai Skou NIELSEN ( EOS / JAOO), Floyd MARINESCU ( InfoQ) and Michael LONNON of Sun Microsystems UK. A special shout out to Antje KING of Pearson UK for sponsoring our book prizes at both conferences.
Top challengers:
- Jakob Avlund, Lund & Bendsen (DK), was the only challenger to get 5/5
- Roland Nelson of the European Patent Office got 4/5 more than any other challenger. He's responsible for THIS portal among others...
- Signe Kongsgaard Kyster, Lund & Bendsen (DK). One of the few female challengers, came in 1st place once and 2nd place twice
2007-03-05
This exam covers the new features from the java.util.concurrent package in Java 5. Ever wonder what a CountDownLatch is?
Check out the exam!
Thanks to Chris Cooper, a brown belt from the UK and Jimmy Persson, a brown belt from Sweden, for leading our Java SE Concurrency High-Level exam, which gets you 3 knowledge points.
2007-02-22
Why is this important news?
Because that's the topic of the next competition. Registration opens soon...
A great way to prepare for the upcoming competition is to take the exam. (And PLEASE, don't forget to vote on the questions!)
What's more is there's a new auction (opening shortly) for the Java Concurrency book by Brian Goetz.
2007-02-01
We really appreciate that users give us their free time; moderators and admins have been very dedicated to the application.
Recently we asked some of the moderators to take on special missions. In particular, to help us get some outstanding tasks done like moving questions. For example, too difficult questions from the Java SE Basic exam to more appropriate exams.
Over the past few weeks we've seen a significant increase of new yellow belts because of this effort. For this we shout out a huge "Thanks!" to Amzad Basha.
2007-01-22
Our website reached a truly significant milestone: a tally of one million answers (to the multiple choice questions) in the database. We're very proud of this because it shows you are a really (really) active community, sharing your precious time for the JavaBlackBelt exams. In particular, this tally means one million times (that's A LOT of activity) you read through, understood and then answered a question.
And for that, we'd like to thank you for your continued efforts, interest and dedication.
2007-01-18
I met Pietro Polsinelli, one of the TeamWork creators, at JAOO (Danish Java/methodo/.Net) conference, where he demonstrated their brain child. We were very impressed by the detailed user interface of this web application, which looks more like a desktop application.
Since JAOO (September '06), I randomly looked at the TeamWork on-line demos, though I couldn't (then) clearly figure out what to do with the application.
Between Christmas and new year, I had a look at BaseCamp (one of TeamWork's competitors) which is a beautiful application for managing tasks. I immediately saw how we could benefit from it. While it is very easy to use, it's just wasn't powerful enough for our needs.
So, I tried Teamwork again and could realize why (in the heck) it had so many features. I finally realized that TeamWork was exactly what I needed for part of our team.
Our JavaBlackBelt development team uses a bug/request tracker (JavaForge.com).
Our commercial team uses a CRM (SalesForce.com).
And now, the rest of our team (management, back office/admin, PR/media, marketing) uses TeamWork.
We started 10 days ago and we have more than 200 tasks in it. These tasks come from individual to-do lists and now they are in a team repository :-)
Many thanks to Pietro Polsinelli and his team!
Pietro, you must be one darn brilliant Java web developer to have made that! We hope to see you (soon) with a black belt.
John Rizzo
Co-creator of JavaBlackBelt
2007-01-08
We have had much to be pleased about, particularly because of your energetic and inventive dedication for improving JavaBlackBelt over the past year.
This time last year we had a few exams. Soon after we announced the yellow belt. By the end of 2006, we had announced other belts -- up to the brown belt -- and had many more exams to offer.
Because of you, JavaBlackBelt now has 28 exams, 16 more in Beta and 17 under construction. Plus, there are 14000 questions in the DB -- that's 8000 more in only one year.
In 2007, around March, we will roll out the long-awaited black belt exam; other certifications will follow.
An extra special "Thank you!" to our most dedicated volunteer technical administrator, Jeanne "Brown Belt" Boyarsky, who helped our moderators in myriad ways.
We also thank the Top 10 contributors (per points) ever:
1. Amzad Basha, 3767 points
2. Jeanne Boyarsky, 3377 points
3. Guillermo Schwarz, 2553 points
4. Mohammed Yousuff, 2048 points
5. Pravin Jain, 1992 points
6. Alwin Ibba, 1388 points
7. Ankur Gupta, 1169 points
8. Nicolas Duran, 855 points
9. Thomas Schroeder, 826 points
10. Sunil Parmar, 815 points
And 11. Chris Cooper, 743 points, who gave his support whenever we asked for it.
Y'know what else? There's more fun stuff to bid on THIS WEEK with 10 new auctions -- 3 with Think Geek gift certificates!
Stay tuned for more news about what's coming up in 2007.
~ The JavaBlackBelt Team
2007-01-03
London-based Skills Matter partners with JavaBlackBelt. The partnership delivers a unique blended-learning solution to UK software architects and developers across the UK.
Read the press release ...
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2007-03-29
The JavaBlackBelt platform was chosen as the top innovation in the "Management, marketing and strategy" (for an SMC) category.
Each winner received a trophy awarded during the Entreprendre Trade Fair, by Mr Benoît Cerexhe, a Minister of the Government of the Brussels Capital Region and by professor Kenneth P. Morse, Senior Lecturer and Managing Director at the MIT Entrepreneurship Center, the renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston (USA).
Winners were selected based on certain criteria:
- true innovative nature and proven originality,
- financial performance evaluated in terms of profits generated and/or savings gained, put into perspective with the development and implementation costs of the innovation,
- interest and pertinence, namely the amount of added value generated or potential added value both for the company and for Society in general,
- transferability to other sectors, their inspirational nature and their ability to train other companies in similar approaches.
More about BIA here...
2007-03-23
To celebrate the clocks springing forward for daylight savings (EU&UK) this weekend,***
brown belt Henryk Konsek has created a Spring DAO JDBC exam.
We need your questions! Here's your chance to rake in some contribution points.
Check out the exam objectives...
(*** => a little joke to remind you to turn your clocks ahead.)
2007-02-23
 Tom Copeland kindly reviewed the objectives of the PMD exam. (And, he wrote about our community and the exam on his blog!) The PMD exam, still in Beta, will move to the exam zone much faster with the help of your contributions.
A committer of PMD, Tom is the lead developer of PMD core and a programmer for InfoEther, LLC. He started programming on a TRS-80 Model III, but demand for that skill has waned. Tom now works mostly in Java and Ruby. He's the sysadmin for rubyforge.org and a contributor to various open source projects. He's the author of "PMD Applied", has a book on "JavaCC" in the pipeline, and blogs sporadically (he's the father of six children.)
2007-02-07
Sometimes we notice a user who blazes through the belt track. Dominik Klimczak happens to be one of them. Dominik got his brown belt in less than one month.
Read the interview...
2007-01-24
Give some of them away!
It's E-Z to do:
- Go into your profile
- Click "Manage..."
- Click "list contributions"
- There, below your profile description, you'll see the panel to give points.
WHY give points (aside from being a nice person)?
- Help a fellow JavaBlackBelt user's eligibility for an exam/new belt
- Team up with someone for an auction
2007-01-20
Green Belt Graeme Dunlop, released the Regular Expressions exam, which gives you 2 knowledge points.
2007-01-12
Brown Belt Sergey Trasko, created the Java NIO exam, which was given the green light by Java architect, consultant and author of Java NIO (O'Reilly), Ron Hitchens. The exam will go into Beta very soon.
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Check out the 
