JavaBlackBelt Newsletter - May 08

In this newsletter:

• Get your green belt for free
• A new forum and a new blog
• John Rizzo at JavaOne
• Moderator spotlight
• JBB in the real world: boosting skills at a global financial institution

Get your green belt for free

It's been 4 years now since JBB started and we are proud of what the community has achieved:

There are 55 released exams (84 counting beta exams), for a total of 31,210 available questions. Our 39,274 users have taken a combined 240,396 exams during which they gave 2,684,770 answers, 53% of which were correct!

Now that we have so much material ready to challenge you, we've decided to make more of it free. Currently, only the two exams needed to get the yellow belt are free. From now on, if you follow a given path, you can take up to 9 exams without any contribution.

The pros and cons have been discussed in the following forum thread, feel free to have a look.

The next features we are going to focus on are the tools that help moderators do their work. A first step will be to unify question listings, and as usual we've started a thread to welcome all your suggestions.

New forum, new blog

By the way, We've finally integrated our own forum ... Currently the integration is light (login only) but we plan to enhance this with features such as :

• Better graphical layout integration
• Forum sections restricted to certain belts/roles
• User profile details synchronized with forum avatars
  

We've started a blog, Inside JavaBlackBelt, discussing our daily programming joys, ideas, hopes and fears, the weird bugs we face and platform tips 'n' tricks. We've tried to start with a bang ;)

Please suggest more ideas for the forum and/or the blog if you have any!

John Rizzo at JavaOne

This week is special for the Java folks, as JavaOne is taking over San Francisco. John Rizzo, co-founder and active member of the community is attending this great event (and all the related parties). Yellow belts and up are welcome to meet him for a free hug. More seriously, if you want to arrange a meeting with John, a new thread was created on the forum where you can propose a schedule. John will be glad to hear your comments & suggestions live.

Moderator spotlight

Congratulations to all our moderators for their hard work, with special mention going to:

• Benedikt for the Java 3D - Basic exam, JAX-B exam and c# exams
• Jacek & Toni for the OSGi exam
• Amzad for racking up 10.000 contributions points
• Yours truly for the Algo - Basic and Programming Aptitude exams

JavaBlackBelt Boosts Java competencies for a Major Financial Institution

Early this year JavaBlackBelt was selected to boost the Java competencies at a global financial institution (which has preferred to remain anonymous).

This long-term project is of strategic importance to the institution, which has gone through several years of strong growth, with several acquisitions. As a result, the IT Division needed, first, a clear picture of its current Java competencies, and second, a way to boost them.

JavaBlackBelt was selected for its ability to make long term competence improvements. The JavaBlackBelt.com platform, combined with our experience coaching Java teams, were decisive in the group choosing JavaBlackBelt to help them “build better developers”.

In a first phase, the project team inventoried the current competencies using SkillScan. This tool was developed initially for recruiters to assess the Java skills of potential employees both for individuals and teams.

Currently the project team is implementing LearnExam. LearnExam stimulates learning and self-study, tracks team knowledge, manages learning objectives, and promotes company-wide skills recognitions.

According to the institution's CIO: “Implementing JavaBlackBelt within our division is making Java competence measurable. It allows us to better identify our projects' skills requirements. And last but not least, it significantly improves the ROI of our Java training budget.”

 

Until next time ...

The JavaBlackBelt Team