Next week, I'm flying to Bangalore for the Great Indian Developer Summit (GIDS). I've been asked as a keynote speaker for the third year in a row.

This was my keynote in 2017:

The Belgian financial news paper "De Tijd" published an opinion by Bruno Lowagie: Sensibiliseren tegen factuurfraude kan overboord. In English, it reads like this:

Woohoo! I'm a speaker at SXSW!

I haven't been very active on my blog the last couple of years. Old blog posts were archived when I switched to a new Drupal version, and the only posts I wrote were about the performance of the iText web site. That's no longer needed now that the marketing team at iText was extended, so you probably won't see much activity on this site anymore, apart from an occasional update of my bio page.

Not sure if I'll get some more hats before the end of the 2017 Winterbash, but this is the situation so far:

This is my talk on the importance of Intellectual Property (IP) rights in the context of open source, at the Open Source India conference in 2016:

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?