Java Black Belt

Java Black Belt is a community website aiming at "building better developers". Given the name, it's targeting mainly Java developers but some exams cover Ruby, .NET C#…

Every user has a belt like in karate, the color (from white to black) represents user's knowledge of Java, common frameworks, tools… To get next belt you need to pass some specific exams and have a certain amount of knowledge points.

You get knowledge points by passing exams. An exam is usually a list of multiple choices questions, you need a certain amount of good answers to pass the test (around 80% successful answers). If you fail an exam you need to wait some time before trying it again (around 15 days).

To get an exam you need some contribution points (except if you decide to follow the "Belt Track", doing the exams in a predefined order). Contribution points are obtained when writing a question, reporting problems on a question, etc. So all the questions are created by the community, voted by the users (to have them accepted or rejected).

Since I mostly didn't write anything in Java for a year and a half, I need to train myself a bit before taking an exam (I don't really want to be forced to wait 15 days before trying an exam again).

So basically the website (until the black belt) is just checking your knowledge of Java and does not check if you are really able to write good code. In order to check that, the exam to get the black belt IS a programming task, but it's not yet released (so nobody as a black belt yet).

One drawback I see is that several questions are useless. Since there is no point using Java without a proper IDE (as one of my colleagues says: "The power of Java is IntelliJ."), questions about knowing by heart all the details of Java APIs, questions like "Does the following program compile?" are meaningless.

During my (short) career, I was interviewed several times and I interviewed several people. Quite often there are some technical questions to be sure that the interviewee knows a bit of Java, so sometimes I was asking questions like the ones found on Java Black Belt. Seeing the belt somebody obtained on this website will reduce the number of technical questions I have to ask, Java Black Belt already did it.

But in fact, if I need somebody in the team I'm working in, Java Black Belt is not enough. Of course it's a hint about is knowledge, but it does not tell me how the guy works. But at least I have more time in the interview to ask those questions.