Competition in the advocacy sphere

Geertjan Wielenga: What about the other developer advocates in your orbit? You come across them on Twitter and then you see them at conferences, but what is your relationship with them? Is the word "rivalry" of any relevance?

Simon Ritter: No, I think "rivalry" is the wrong term. If I was going to use that word then it would be "friendly rivalry."

Most of the time, the kind of subject matter that I cover (the JVM and Java SE) is not something that many other people tend to target. The majority of people, when I go to conferences, deal with frameworks like Spring, the enterprise side of things, microservices, embedded, and all sorts of other things. So, they tend to come at speaking from a slightly different angle. The people who you would expect me to see as competitors at conferences are the people from Oracle. Clearly, they're also presenting on Java SE, but Oracle has reduced the number of people in...