Several speakers at the DevTernity online developer conference, which was scheduled to take place on December 7, have withdrawn after event organizer Eduards Sizovs was accused of trying to make the program attractive to non-existent female speakers and inviting more well-known speakers. Kelsey Hightower, a former Google legal expert, publicly criticized the organizer in a post published on Platform By the time the event was cancelled, 1,300 of the $870 tickets had been purchased.
The idea of the Simley came to light after Gergely Oros, author of the technology newsletter Pragmatic Engineering, wrote in a post Post it On According to Russian speculation, event organizers created fake profiles for women to make the event appear more diverse, thus increasing its appeal to more popular male performers.
Christine Howard, head of developer relations at Amazon Web Services and the only speaker present at the conference, called the situation “astonishing” and confirmed that she had not heard from Syzovsek since she emailed her about canceling the event.
According to Sizov, Boyko was one of the press areas created during testing of the site and his profile was accidentally left on the list of speakers after two real experts canceled his participation. Since he was trying to fill the slots with new invitees, he didn’t delete the fake profiles until then either. Boyko’s speaker profile has since been removed from the conference’s website.
According to Sizov, Uros accused him of intending to “cancel” him from the community, because the comment did not directly mention him before the post. On the other hand, Orosz found evidence that the incident was not a one-time event, and that events organized by the Sizovs have included fake speakers several times in recent years, including an event called JDKon. In addition to Boyko, according to Orosz, DevTernity previously created fake profiles for Natalie Stadler (an alleged Coinbase employee) and Alina Prokhoda (an alleged WhatsApp employee), who not only not worked at the companies mentioned, but also do not exist.
Media 404 according to A very popular tech influencer Instagram account called Coding Unicorn may be secretly run by the Sizovs. Coding Unicorn is said to be run by a real woman named Julia Kirsina, but 404 Media found that IP logs, YouTube videos, social media posts, and other evidence point to Sizov’s control of the account. One of the most striking signs is that some of Kirsina’s Instagram posts are word for word exactly the same as Sizovs’ LinkedIn posts, which the organizer even reused several years later. It is still unclear whether or not Kirsina is truly a fake person, as the photos taken of her are real.
