I don't have as much time for Stack Overflow as I used to. Last year, I won 20 hats, this year only 19.

I was very close to an extra hat: I was 6 reputation points short of getting a gold badge for the Java tag...

Next week, we'll publish iText's year in pictures on the iText blog, listing all the events we attended and all the awards we won, but I already want to give you a preview of all the people who made this possible:

From right to left:

I safely returned from Las Vegas, and I hope I can spend the rest of the year at home, so I can already take a look at my travel statistics.

Gamification, love it or hate it, but every year thousands of developers try to collect as many "winter bash hats" as possible on StackOverflow and its sibling sites. In 2013, I collected 12 hats. In 2014, I collected 15 hats. But how many hats did I win this year?

Last year, I collected 12 hats in StackOverflow's Winter Bash.

This year, I have 15 hats: I could get some more, for instance by deleting one of my own answers, or by doing complicated things such as voting to close a question, edit the question, and then reopen the question, but I'm not that obsessed by those hats ;-) I collect hats because it's fun ;-)

The Winter Bash at the Stack Exchange Network is almost over, and this year I managed to collect 12 hats on StackOverflow. Let's take a screen shot before they are put back in their boxes:

As read on Stackoverflow: