Organised by Congo Jug, JCertif is the premier event for the Central Africa IT community.

JCertif 2010 will be one of the first conferences in the Central Africa to teach developers the Java programming and the basics of developing on mobile platforms.

Speakers will include many of the local and world’s respected experts - both developers of the technology, and applications and systems users. Want to participate for free? Here is the auction. All participants to the auction get a 20% discount, so you're always a winner!

Congo-Jug also organises free courses on August 27-29, click here to register. Attendees to explore, share, and collaborate on the latest developments and practices related to Java technology, Web 2.0 and Mobiles apps. Given that a large majority of people on the continent of Africa have access to the Internet via their mobile phones, it was difficult to ignore the mobile applications and especially the Web2.0. JCertif topics fit with the needs of both local developers and enterprises of the Central Africa region.

We've updated the remote congratulation box to handle the new group feature.
Have a look at the updated instructions page (group related explanations are at the bottom of the page).

As described earlier, we've made an effort to open our public data via a REST API. The details for accessing the data are summarized here
We guess our great community will publish some javascript widgets to consume them soon.
Feel free to give us your feedback.

JAOO is a world class conference that covers the latest developments across the software landscape.
The format includes 3 conference days and 3 training days with 80+ presentations and 20+ training sessions. With 21 tracks, JAOO highlights a broad range of topics that are top of mind for today's professional development community.

This year’s program include lots of top speakers like, James Gosling, Brian Goetz, Rod Johnson, Juergen Hoeller, and Bill Pugh for the full programme go to www.jaoo.org

Until now, the only way to contribute to BlackBeltFactory was to improve the technical content (exams or courses). In the future, we'll add restrictions to who may improve the content giving more possibilities to more skilled authors.

But how can the average Joe programmer with a yellow belt contribute if we restrict content contributions?
We had to provide another way to contribute. We named that "social contributions". To summarize, give BlackBeltFactory some exposure on the web, and you'll get contribution points. As simple as that.

Logged in users have noticed the new "Contrib" black button in the header. It links to your Contribution page where you have an overview on how to get contribution points.

You can:

• Integrate your LinkedIn and Twitter accounts with BlackBeltFactory.
  We'll update your LinkedIn status and tweet when you'll get your next belt, for example.
• Manual References: mention BlackBeltFactory on your blog, on a forum post, anywhere, and you'll get between 1 and 10 points.
  You submit the url (blog, forum post,...) and a brown+ belt will verify it.
• Job Ads: convince the recruitement team of your company to mention BlackBeltFactory (as "blue belt welcome") in a job ad, and get 10 points.
• Verifications: brown and black belt earn 0.5 points every time they verify a reference or job ad.
• Automatic references: Get points every week people look at your profile page on BlackBeltFactory, or when they follow a link to us with the parameter "/ref=YourNickName".
• Profile completion: Get a few points when you upload your picture and/or a video.
  Note that we've run a batch to give 2 points to anybody having already a picture on his profile.
• Recruitement / Reactivation: You can send special links to future or innactive existing users to bind them to you.
  Every time they will pass a belt, you'll get 5 points.

As usual, we don't exactly know what will happen with these features. That's a common problem of inventors.
We'll seat back and see what you do with them ;-)

As you noticed Nicolas and I are furiously developping these last weeks.

Start creating groups. You have created few groups already, mostly country based. Don't hesitate to create a group for your company, for your university, for your class.

Two coworkers from your company are also on BlackBeltFactory? Create a group, and soon you will put your brand in the "top groups of the week" home page list!

It's easy and powerful. You can screen memberships, pre-invite, and create sub-groups.

As a user, you can be member of as many groups as you like. One of them will be your primary group, and will display below your name inside user lists.

From a group's page, you can see other group members activity, and congratulate them for their progresses.

Have fun ;-)

During the past months, we've received several requests of members wanting to integrate their profile, belt, exam results, ... in their blog or website. Therefore, we are currently considering opening our database via a kind of REST API limited to consuming our data : read-only, no security -> public data served only. Please have a look at this forum thread to give us your input.

After several months of thorough analysis, Landmark Halliburton selected BlackBeltFactory Enterprise Edition to help them organize and motivate learning in Java technologies.

Landmark Halliburton challenge was to implement a skills management program that would be capable of maintaining a real-time inventory of IT skills and establish a common base across the organization on which individual skills could be measured, evaluated and improved.

“After evaluating several shortlisted solutions, Landmark Halliburton selected BlackBeltFactory Enterprise Edition as the best fit for our requirements for a Java Skills Management and Java Learning platform”, stated PMO Director, Chris Ring. Regarding the organization-wide rollout, Ms. Ring had the following feedback, “Our rollout of BlackBeltFactory has been fast and enthusiastically embraced by our developers. In a little over a month 15 developers have reached brown belt status and met the requirements for a $1000 bonus already. We couldn’t be happier!”.

For information about how your organization can benefit from BlackBeltFactory Enterprise Edition contact us.

About Landmark Halliburton:
Founded in 1919, Halliburton is one of the world's largest providers of products and services to the energy industry. With more than 50,000 employees in approximately 70 countries, the company serves the upstream oil and gas industry throughout the life cycle of the reservoir -- from locating hydrocarbons and managing geological data, to drilling and formation evaluation, well construction and completion, and optimizing production through the life of the field.

Finally what the JBB community has been waiting for: the release of the Black belt.

June 6th onwards, all Brown Belts having 80+ knowledge points AND being coach level 2, will earn the Black Belt. If you don't like to coach at all (come on!), alternative conditions (eg, prog task) might be proposed in the future, but we cannot commit on a date.

At least now it's possible to be a Black Belt.

You want to be Black Belt on June 6th? Good luck!

Congratulations to the Geecon organisers for another great conference.
Over 400 participants, great presentations, and lots of fun!

It was great to connect with so many BlackBeltFactory community members from Poland. Over 100 participants took the BlackBeltFactory Challenge.
The Challenge winners are:

On day one:

1. Adam Warski
2. Mateusz Jarus
3. Tomasz Szymanski

One day two:

1. Wojciech Buras
2. Marcin Kozlowicz
3. Michal Kozlowski

See some pictures of the challenge on Picassa.

Thank you to Damian Lukasik, Brown Belt, who organised the BlackBeltFactory Challenge , and to the Geecon organisers for inviting us.

See you next year!

As promised, we have improved the usability of the application for students and coaches. It has been deployed last week-end.

A refactoring exam has been created by Daniel Gyger from Switzerland. Don't hesitate to fill it with new questions.

We've just deployed last week developments described in this forum thread.

What should we develop next week, to improve student registration and coach usability?

Wanna win a GeeCON conference (Poland) May 12-14 pass?

Either win our GeeCON auction, or represent BlackBeltFactory at the conference.

We ineed want to run the BlackBeltFactory challenge as last year, but our Brussels team cannot attend due to the release of the coached e-learning marketplace. We seek motivated BlackBeltFactory community members to represent us at the conference and run the challenge on our booth. Please contact us for applying or more details.