Being authentic while working for a company

Geertjan Wielenga: When you're at conferences, if you're coming from a particular company, there's the automatic, and probably justified, suspicion that you're there for a reason. How do you balance that authenticity aspect with working for an organization?

Simon Ritter: If I go back through my career history, all the roles that I've had were very much about promoting Java. Most of the time, I didn't need to concern myself with having to push a product. We were focused purely on the tech, rather than a product. That's helped in terms of having credibility because people know that I'm not necessarily going to turn up and talk about a given product.

I suppose there's a very thin line; anyone outside of the tech world wouldn't necessarily see the difference between a tech and a product. But then, if you're promoting something that's essentially free, you can hardly be...