Big names like Kelsey Hightower pull out of the DevTernity conference after allegations its founder made fake profiles of female speakers to boost diversity
Anna Boyko, listed as a staff engineer at Coinbase, and Natalie Stadler, a “software craftswoman” at Coinbase—were included on the site as speakers but appear to not exist in real life. Neither have an online presence beyond the Devternity website itself.” https://www.404media.co/... Mastodon: Taylor Lorenz / @taylorlorenz@mastodon.social : The founder of a software developer conference has been accused of creating fake female speakers to bolster diversity numbers https://www.404media.co/... Courtney Cantrell / @courtcan@mastodon.social : When you hate women so much that you craft fake ones to be exactly what you want them to be. — Well, *that's* never happened before. 🙄 — #WomenInTech — #BlowUpDollsInTech — https://www.404media.co/... Jason Koebler / @jasonkoebler@mastodon.social : The Devternity dev conference is falling apart after the organizer created “auto-generated” women to advertise that it had a diverse set of speakers and moderators — https://www.404media.co/... Joseph Cox / @josephcox@infosec.exchange : New: a tech conference is collapsing after its founder admitted to listing an auto-generated woman on the site as a speaker. Some (real) speakers have dropped out, we spoke to multiple people who were also supposed to go too https://404media.co/... [image] @GeePawHill@mastodon.social : Shouts out to all the big names who've cancelled their appearances at #Devternity . — It sucks to cancel a chance to spread your ideas and energy, but not as much as it would suck to trade your integrity for that chance. — I appreciate it. X: Gergely Orosz / @gergelyorosz : 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. Eduards Sizovs / @eduardsi : 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... Scott Hanselman / @shanselman : 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. Gergely Orosz / @gergelyorosz : To spell it out why this conference generated fake women speakers. Because the organizer wants big names and it probably seemed like an easy way to address their diversity concerns. Incredibly lazy. Kelsey Hightower / @kelseyhightower : @eduardsi 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... @dhh : 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. @notshenetworks : I have... so many questions. Is Eduards catfishing as an IG tech influencer with... 115K followers? The first account she follows is Eduards. The photos go back to late 2019... and the account might also follow the real woman in the photos? [image] Anosh / @kingnoosh : @RedRoxProjects @schutzsmith From an IG post around 2018 [image] Eduards Sizovs / @eduardsi : So I've been called out (and canceled?) by listing a person on my conference's website (who never actually made it to the final program). JUST A RANDOM PERSON ON THE CONFERENCE WEBSITE canceled all the good work I've been doing for 15+ years. All focus on that. I said it was a... Vlad Mihalcea / @vlad_mihalcea : @GergelyOrosz I was supposed to talk at JDkon, but that's not going to happen. I asked to be removed from the conference page yesterday, but the organizer hasn't done anything about it. Gergely Orosz / @gergelyorosz : 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! [image] Joseph Cox / @josephfcox : New: we've obtained IP logs from a forum that shows male tech conference founder Eduards Sizovs is behind the woman coding influencer account “Coding Unicorn.” Same founder who admitted to using an auto-generated woman on his conference speaker list https://www.404media.co/... [image] Daniel Schutzsmith / @schutzsmith : Wait the hole goes deeper, why does the LinkedIn profile for https://www.linkedin.com/... say they work at DevTube but only @eduardsi is mentioned in the footer credits. I'm 99% sure that codingunicorn is @eduardsi either using photoshop or a model to impersonate a woman developer. Gergely Orosz / @gergelyorosz : 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://web.archive.org/... [image] Gergely Orosz / @gergelyorosz : 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... [image] Gergely Orosz / @gergelyorosz : The conference website is up and fake Anna removed. But fake Julia is still there. Listed every year as a speaker, never delivered a talk any year (and “dropped out” this year as well) @lizthegrey did some digging. A fake catfishing profile, it seems. https://www.linkedin.com/... [image] @jenlooper : @hugomn @eduardsi Yes I'd love to get on a video conference call with @UnicornCoding to get her perspective on this, as a fellow woman in tech 👩💻, so we can chat about the speaker lineup and why a lot of my colleagues would not care to participate. Hugo Nogueira / @hugomn : @eduardsi So Julia created https://dev.courses/ on June 9th, and now it's for sale by “Eduards Sizovs”? [image] Lukas Karlsson / @lukwam : So, what are you guys most psyched about at https://devternity.com/ next week? Is it @kelseyhightower's talk at 3:30pm, or @shanselman's talk at 4:40pm? Are are you most excited about the talk from the very real person Julia Kirsina (coding_unicorn at instagram)? @raphaelwimmer : @eduardsi I understand that this is really an unfortunate turn of events for you. However, I am not sure whether I can trust what you are saying, given that you claim that ‘Anna’ was an auto-generated “demo persona from our test website version”. Git log seems to say otherwise. [image] Gergely Orosz / @gergelyorosz : 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. [image] Adam Rackis / @adamrackis : This is actually a common bug. Many don't know, but I built the original website for RenderATL, and my initial version had this very bug! Profiles of women and people of color who don't exist just sort of showed up. Fortunately Justin caught it before launch - dude's sharp! Ina Fried / @inafried : This thread is 🍌s. Finally found something worse than an all male conference lineup. A mostly male lineup but where the listed female speakers don't, in fact, exist. Lukas Karlsson / @lukwam : It's amazing how long this con has been going on. The first Instagram post from @UnicornCoding was in 2018. And within the first two weeks, she posted a screenshot where her home directory is /Users/eduardsi. Seems poorly executed. https://www.instagram.com/... Caroline Orr Bueno, Ph.D / @rvawonk : Re. what I was saying about how terrifyingly easy it is to manufacture entire events that never happened & people that never existed: This conference just invented two women speakers who don't exist. (And I can personally tell you that this conference isn't the first to do it). Gergely Orosz / @gergelyorosz : @lizthegrey Conference page lists speakers who have cancelled. Several others have asked to be removed. No one with a sense of integrity will want to be associated with such a conference. One where organisers created fake speakers for 3 years in a row and still deny there was a problem. Taylor Poindexter / @engineering_bae : I'm used to Gergely doing the Lord's work but I truly didn't see this one coming. Grateful for him not only calling it out, but for many of the speakers refusing to be associated with this and canceling their appearances at the conference. Gergely Orosz / @gergelyorosz : @lizthegrey Jetbrains no longer wanting to be associated with DevTernity or JDKonf. Pulled sponsorship and had their logo removed. Again, show me another conference that has had advertised fake, non-existent speaker profiles for years. Why would any brand want association with one. Samantha Cole / @samleecole : a dev conference organizer got caught faking at least one female speaker, setting off a domino effect of dropouts including speakers from Microsoft, Amazon, & Basecamp. wild to see an event nine days away implode like this: https://www.404media.co/... Vlad Mihalcea / @vlad_mihalcea : Life beats movies Gergely Orosz / @gergelyorosz : @vlad_mihalcea You still talking at his conference, JDKon, where fake Alina was listed for a few months, and fake Julia is still listed as a speaker (she will “pull out” last minute as with all conferences since 2021)? LinkedIn: Liz Fong-Jones : Okay I have to reinforce how bad this is after digging further. Ordinarily I'd be content for speakers & attendees to pull out of a conference … Bronwyn Boyle : The most heartbreaking/infuriating thing is the deliberate choice to ignore so many talented, passionate, insightful, amazing and accomplished womxn … Forums: Hacker News : Organizer invents fake women speakers for DevTernity and JDKon conferences
Context & Ripple Effects
The allegations land in a developer-industry environment where women have long reported barriers to participation, including difficulty securing internships in male-dominated tech workplaces. They turn a conference speaker lineup from a programming signal into a test of whether an organizer's inclusion claims can be trusted.
The claimed profiles also foreshadow a broader credibility problem around online professional identities, echoed by a later report that a prominent accessibility advocate may not have existed at all. Here, the immediate stakes are unusually concrete: named speakers and a sponsor are already severing ties.
First-order effects
- High-profile speakers withdrawing deprives DevTernity of program credibility and puts its remaining event lineup under immediate scrutiny.
- JetBrains' sponsorship withdrawal makes the fallout commercial as well as reputational, while the founder's admission that an auto-generated woman was listed intensifies questions about the other profiles.
Second-order effects
- Other conference organizers and sponsors face pressure to verify speaker identities and diversity claims before publishing lineups, rather than treating a public CFP or profile page as sufficient evidence.
- Real women speakers may bear an added burden to establish legitimacy after a deception framed around representation, worsening a trust problem rather than addressing the participation gap.
Third-order effects
- If sponsors and speakers make verification a condition of participation, conference curation could shift toward more auditable selection and disclosure practices.
- The episode is an early warning that synthetic or fabricated professional identities can create lasting editorial debt: once a roster's authenticity is questioned, the reputational cost spreads to partners and genuine participants.
The trend: As synthetic identities become easier to publish, tech events and platforms will be judged increasingly on verifiable provenance rather than diversity claims alone.