It turns out that an automatically generated non-existent woman was listed as a tech event speaker

It has been revealed that the list of speakers at the international software development conference ' DevTernity ' included a non-existent woman. The organizers have explained that the posting was a 'mistake,' but several speakers scheduled to speak have declined to appear.

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At DevTernity in 2023, Google engineer Kelsey Hightower and game ``DOOM'' designer John Romero are among the scheduled speakers. It has become a hot topic as it has become clear that the person named 'Anna Boyko' who was listed among the speakers does not actually exist.

The page that mentioned a mysterious person named Anna Boyko has already been deleted, but if you check the page before deletion using the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, you will find that Anna Boyko is a staff engineer working for Coinbase, a virtual currency trading company, and an Ethereum developer. It is written that he is also active as a core contributor. However, software engineer Gergely Orosh realized that ``Anna Boyko doesn't exist'' and revealed that information in X.

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

Mr. Orosh noted that the fake person was a woman, saying, ``The organizer, Eduard Sizovs, wanted big names with rich backgrounds, and also because he could ``increase diversity.'' He probably created a profile.''

Furthermore, as a result of Mr. Orosz's investigation, it was found that the person named 'Natalie Stadler' who is on the list of DevTernity speakers in 2021 does not exist, and 'Alina Prokhoda' is also on ' JDKon ', a conference for Java developers hosted by Mr. Sizovs. It became clear that there were people lined up who didn't exist. Mr. Orosh criticized Mr. Sizovs, saying, ``It is better not to attend events with fake speakers.''

In response to this report, Sizovs explained that ``the speaker's profile was automatically generated'' and that he had forgotten to delete the demo he had created during the process of building the website. Although he was aware of the issue a month before Mr. Orosh pointed it out, he decided to postpone fixing it because it was not something that could be fixed right away and he decided it would be better to leave it as is. There is no explanation as to why it was decided that it would be better to keep it.

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

In addition, Mr. Sizovs refuted Mr. Orosz's claim that he had ``placed a fake person in order to increase diversity,'' and said, ``While it is true that diversity was worse than expected this time, initially, Sandy, a writer and programmer,・Three women were scheduled to speak on stage: Ms. Metz, Julia Kirsina, a software engineer and tech influencer, and Kristin Howard, head of developer relations at Amazon Web Services (AWS).However, Ms. Metz due to health issues, and Mr. Kirsina will be responsible for organizing the event.Anna Boyko, who happens to be a woman, has led to criticisms based on diversity, but this is a misunderstanding.'' Did.

On the other hand, other suspicions have also surfaced regarding Mr. Kirsina, who is currently in the midst of a scandal. Several developers investigated Mr. Kirsina and found that although this person appears to be real, some of his posts were copied word for word from Mr. Sizovs's posts, and some of his posts were copied verbatim by Mr. Kirsina's name. It is known that there is a close connection between Mr. Schizovs and Mr. Kirsina, as a code indicating that he is logged in to Instagram was found.

From an IG post around 2018 pic.twitter.com/Hl1XFMy9Ay

— anosh (@KingNoosh) November 26, 2023

In addition, there is no doubt that there is some kind of relationship between the two, as evidence has been confirmed that Mr. Sizovs was logged into Mr. Kirsina's Google account on his PC.

DevTube OAuth verification demo - YouTube


In response to the fact that a fake person was listed as a scheduled speaker, Google's Mr. Hightower, Microsoft's vice president of development community Scott Hanselman, and others canceled their talks.