Programmer Gergely Orosz has exposed the organisers of the Latvian IT conference DevTernity for deception — the event’s site lists non-existent speakers.
Imagine a tech conference having no CFP, as they reach out to speakers directly. They successfully attract some of the most heavy hitter men speakers in tech, and 3 women speakers.
Now imagine my surprise that 2 of those women are FAKE profiles.
They do not exist.
Nada.
— Gergely Orosz (@GergelyOrosz) November 24, 2023
After analysing the speakers, he noted that two of the three women speakers are fakes. In particular, he points to a certain Anna Boyko, presented as a Coinbase employee and a key participant in the Ethereum project.
Which conference?
Well, where Anna Boyko, Staff engineer at Coinbase and Ethereum core contributor is a speaker.
Her. She doesn’t exist. Except as a listed speaker at a prominent online conference! pic.twitter.com/8iFiCHbu8I
— Gergely Orosz (@GergelyOrosz) November 25, 2023
Former and current Coinbase employees, as well as Ethereum developers, told Orosz they did not know her. According to GitHub, Boyko’s profile had been listed among participants since January 21, and a couple of days later her photograph was replaced.
Another fake profile, according to Orosz, is Alina Prokhoda, listed as a participant at the Java conference JDKon in May 2024, organised by the DevTernity team. Prokhoda allegedly is a senior engineer at WhatsApp and a Microsoft MVP. Yet Orosz found that such a person does not exist.
Or another Java conference by the exact same organizer where Microsoft MVP and WhatsApp senior engineer Alina Prokhoda is a featured speaker.
Would you know there is no such Microsoft MVP and Meta employee.
Speakers listed on these conference had no idea I talked with… pic.twitter.com/GtQzCWuQFV
— Gergely Orosz (@GergelyOrosz) November 25, 2023
He says that in 2021 and 2022 the DevTernity organisers had already used similar misdirection. A certain Natalie Stadler, a Coinbase software engineer, never actually worked there.
DevTernity has had fake women speakers listed for years.
Here is fake Anna Boyle’s “colleague” fake Natalie Stadler claimed to be at Coinbase (no such person ever worked there ofc — I checked).
She “spoke” in 2022 there as well.
Just incredible.https://t.co/q4mpwrw3ym pic.twitter.com/2sdhEcuORc
— Gergely Orosz (@GergelyOrosz) November 25, 2023
Additionally, Orosz uncovered the profile of Julia Kirsina, listed as a DevTernity participant in 2021, 2022 and 2023, though she never spoke at the conference. Kirsina is said to be a software developer and tech influencer on Instagram; on Xing (the Dutch analogue of LinkedIn) she is listed as a software engineer in Uber’s Estonian division. According to Orosz, Uber has never had engineering offices in Estonia.
This is Julia’s Xing profile (basically LinkedIn for Germany). She is/was an architect at Uber Estonia?!
Uber never had no eng office in Estonia. No such person ever worked at Uber.
On LinkedIn, her profile used to have Microsoft in the past as well.https://t.co/IdRZ8zSrdP pic.twitter.com/AHX4PvF3BA
— Gergely Orosz (@GergelyOrosz) November 26, 2023
The on-site technical lead at Honeycomb.io, Liz Fong-Jones, analysed Kirsina’s profiles across several sites. She said the accounts were tied to DevTernity’s organisers.
On her Instagram account Kirsina posts semi-provocative photos with laptops, mixing business topics with flirtation. Over five years, the coding_unicorn account has attracted 115,000 followers.
Yet Kirsina shows no traceable path to becoming a professional, yet she actively seeks to present herself as a woman developer. For example, she asked to be added to the WomenOfDotNet list.
An administrator of the lobste.rs site told 404.media that they banned Kirsina’s profile as a virtual organizer of DevTernity’s Eduards Sizovs.
Some coding_unicorn posts are identical to Sizovs’s posts.
In one of Sizovs’s videos, Kirsina’s email address appears alongside his other accounts.
Conversely, in Instagram photos Kirsina appears logged in under Sizovs’s accounts.
From an IG post around 2018 pic.twitter.com/Hl1XFMy9Ay
— anosh (@KingNoosh) November 26, 2023
In 2020 Kirsina complained that online, because of her appearance, she was labelled as not a real developer.
After the social-media uproar, photos of Boyko and Prokhoda disappeared from the site. However, a GitHub commit entitled “remove Anna” remains.
The website had a public GitHub repo where you could see the full edit history that someone found and pointed to me.
You could see eg how fake Anna was added 10 months ago. Or how after being called out for what it is, the organizer removed fake women speaker profiles. pic.twitter.com/9QLI97PER0
— Gergely Orosz (@GergelyOrosz) November 25, 2023
DevTernity organiser Eduards Sizovs replied to Orosz’s thread, accusing him of premature conclusions and reputational damage.
Dear Reader,
If you know me well, you know that I have high standards of work and professional ethics. You know that DevTernity has been my life’s work, and DevTernity is the event that I love and deeply care about. We’ve always delivered on the promise, and the event has been…
— Eduards Sizovs (@eduardsi) November 25, 2023
According to him, finding women speakers in the industry is difficult. He conceded there was only one fake speaker — Anna Boyko. He said her profile had been automatically generated and was only a temporary placeholder, removing it was not a quick task.
Orosz reminded that, in fact, the fake profiles were removed from the site immediately.
In the wake of the scandal, several speakers withdrew from DevTernity — notably Ruby on Rails author David Heinemeier Hansson. He called the situation “strange.”
What a strange tale. Never seen anything like this in decades of speaking at conferences. Regardless of what may ultimately be up or down here, I’m out. https://t.co/97aK4525NV
— DHH (@dhh) November 26, 2023
One of the key .NET developers, Scott Hanselman, explained his decision by emphasising inclusivity of participants.
This whole conference debacle is so disappointing. Speakers like myself, when invited to a conf will immediately say “who alls gonna be there?” I’ve my rules for participation posted on my site — including an inclusive lineup — for years. I was duped by the fake speakers also. https://t.co/LBWIPZILT2
— Scott Hanselman ? (@shanselman) November 27, 2023
Prominent Kubernetes contributor Kelsey Hightower spoke out against the “misleading” conduct.
As someone who has organized and helped run large events, I understand how challenging it can be to put together a program and oversee an event from start to finish.
However, based on your own telling of the events, I take issue with continuing to advertise speakers who have…
— Kelsey Hightower (@kelseyhightower) November 26, 2023
Engineer Robert Martin also said he would not participate in DevTernity.
On the DevTernity site, ticket sales were paused with the label “sold out,” though there are no seating limits since the conference is online.
Ultimately, DevTernity 2023 was cancelled, according to The Register.
As a reminder, in 2019 Andreas Antonopoulos, a well-known entrepreneur and crypto-philosophy advocate, nearly cancelled his participation in Blockchain Week in Hong Kong over reports of escort-model participation.