‘What a strange tale’: Bizarre scandal rocks world of tech

DevTernity is a bumper conference for software and tech developers, previously held each year in Latvia but which has been online-only since the start of the Covid pandemic.

Tickets to the 2023 event sold for as much as A$1300 for audience members keen to hear some of the biggest names in tech speak, including Scott Hanselman, principal architect at Microsoft, and Fred George, co-inventor of Microservices.

The 2023 event, which was scheduled to go ahead on December 7, featured just three women speakers — but it appears that at least one of them didn’t exist.

Gergely Orosz, who runs a popular tech newsletter, first aired the allegations on Twitter.

He accused DevTernity organiser Eduards Sizovs of faking several of his women speakers’ profiles to boost the diversity of the event.

“Imagine a tech conference … successfully attracts some of the most heavy hitter men speakers in tech, and three women speakers,” Mr Orosz alleged on X.

“Now imagine my surprise that two of those women are FAKE profiles. They do not exist. Nada.”

“The conference organisers created fake profiles to make it seem there will be more women speaking than [was] the case,” he alleged.

It turns out, in at least one case, Mr Orosz was correct.

Event organiser Mr Sizovs admitted he had “auto-generated” one of the women’s profiles, that of Anna Boyko. Ms Boyko’s fake profile was removed from the DevTernity website, but web archives show her with a brunette bob and glasses, described as a “staff engineer” at Coinbase and “core contributor” at Ethereum.

Mr Sizovs claimed that the woman’s profile was generated for website-testing and should not have appeared in the line-up, but said he temporarily chose not to fix his mistake after another woman speaker pulled out.

It’s unclear what DevTernity’s plan was when ticketholders turned up to hear Ms Boyko speak.

Mr Sizovs said DevTernity’s lack of diversity was due to “1000s of events chasing the same small subgroup of female speakers”.

Importantly, DevTernity does not allow tech experts to apply to speak and instead chooses to contact them directly — what it describes as a “don’t call us, we’ll call you” approach.

Mr Sizovs confirmed the event’s cancellation in an emailed statement, writing: “It looks like someone really wanted to deliberately damage the conference.”

Nearly half of DevTernity’s guest speakers pulled out before the event was cancelled, several of whom cited the scandal.

David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of application framework Ruby on Rails, said: “I’m out.”

“What a strange tale. Never seen anything like this in decades of speaking at conferences,” he added.

Meanwhile, actual women software developers continue to exist.

Mr Hanselman, the Microsoft executive who was scheduled to appear at DevTernity, said he only speaks at conferences with inclusive line-ups but had been “duped by the fake speakers.”

He said on X: “I remind all tech conference organisers that there are THOUSANDS of speakers of all walks of life, genders, ages, and backgrounds.”