Gergely Orosz Profile picture
Nov 24, 2023 29 tweets 10 min read Read on 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.
I contacted speakers I know about this.

They had no idea.

One of the fake women profiles is supposedly a core Ethereum contributor, and a staff engineer at Coinbase.

No such contributor, no one heard of her at Coinbase now or before.

Why do this?
Sad to say but going forward if you are invited to speak at a lesser-know conference: do your diligence… if other listed speakers actually exist?!

This is a paid online conference, large number of (paid) attendees, workshops sold out.

What a mess.
Just to be very clear this is about the organisers creating fake profiles.
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.
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
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
This conference doesn’t have a call for papers because they follow the “Hollywood principle” (that sounds made up btw)

But then do AI generated images, fake names and titles for some fake women speakers profiles… and I cannot fathom WHY.

Absolute laziness and dubious ethics. Image
If you bought tickets to DevTernity (“DevTernity”) on 7-8 Dec you’ve been duped with fake speaker Anna Boyle who is still on the website. A made up profile, AI image, no such staff eng at Coinbase.

And some other listed women speakers don’t actually talk

devternity.com
And if you are planning to buy tickets to JDKon 2024 (#1 international conference designed specifically for professional Java developers.) on 22-24 May 2024: save your money because Alina Prokhoda doesn’t exist either.

This conf:

Same organizer.dev.events/conferences/ta…
Anything organized by “Dev events” is by the same organizer who creates these fake women speakers (and has some in the past as well) for some mysterious reason.

All their conferences:



I would avoid like the plague with such dubious ethics.

Why?? dev.events
Image
What do you know - after being called out, the organizer is removing some fake women profiles.

Here’s the archived website. Fake Anna Boyle (staff eng at a Coinbase, core Ethereum contributor) was there for only 10 months, while most tickets were sold.

web.archive.org/web/2023110914…
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.

web.archive.org/web/2021112802…
Image
And there’s no more conference website.

For now, that is. Image
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
Image
The organizer responded, claiming he tried so hard to get women speakers but it’s… too hard. For a paid (!) conference w a price of €789 / $870 per person.

Meanwhile others just… invite a variety of people, including so many women. They exist. If you actually care that is.
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.

linkedin.com/posts/efong_ge…
Image
@lizthegrey 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.

xing.com/profile/Julia_…
Image
@lizthegrey The organizer claims they 1x accidentally added a fake speaker to their conferences. But actually:

2021 & 2022: fake Natalie & Julia
2023: fake Anna, Alina & Julia

All listed as speakers. Never delivered a talk. Not removed from the site till this thread.

Once a mistake, sure.
@lizthegrey Several speakers cancelled, already let the organizer know they won’t present.

I don’t blame them for not wanting to endorse a conference with a history of catfishing with fake women speakers for years.

As fast as the organizer was to remove fake Anna, they are still listed.
@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.
@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.
@lizthegrey It’s not just DHH who’s never seen anything like this. None of us have.

A conference organizer inventing and promoting fake, non-existing speakers for years has no business in tech going forward.
@lizthegrey Speakers have been cancelling en masse and asking the organizer to disassociate them from DevTernity and JDKon. They are still on the site so are making it clear in public they have no further association.

Imagine duping such high profile folks. What was this organizer thinking.
@lizthegrey For years, this conference series (DevTernity, JDKon) has been duping speakers who care about diversity and nominate underrepresented speakers for non-diverse lineups.

Obviously on top of duping customers paying ~$800 per ticket for speakers who do not exist.
This thread started as fake speaker accounts at DevTernity and JDKon.

It ends with what is very likely a catfishing Instagram account operated for 5 years: Coding Unicorn. Growing it to 115K Insta followers to promote the conference.

Shameful.

@TimothyMaksim Oh wait you’re an AI generated image. Ok anon.
@AlexeyEccc @simekadam @lizthegrey And sure: some reviews might not be fake. But the only objectively verifiable review is from a fake account!

This goes back to: what can you possibly trust after that?

Perhaps all reviews are real, save for the one with the full name? Maybe. But then, why??
Published a summary, summarizing what I uncovered about the non-existent speakers.

Fun fact: the first fake speaker was added *the same day* as someone complained about the lack of women speakers, here, on Twitter, on 3 Aug 2021!

Coincidence?

blog.pragmaticengineer.com/devternity-fak…
Image

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More from @GergelyOrosz

May 1
Here’s one reason Apple fought tooth and nail to disallow web payments for apps:

Because Apple’s IAP is bad in many ways, and *so many* apps will move to web-based payments now not mainly because of the 30% Apple fee, but because of how bad IAP is.

Let me give you examples:
1. Refunds

With Apple IAP it’s just not possible to do!! No, it really is not for the merchant. They cannot do a full or partial refund. Talk about poor customer support!

2. Group subscriptions. Nonexistent with IAP.

3. Paying using a non-credit card option. IAP does not allow
4. CUSTOMER SUPPORT

In general, with Apple’s IAP this is nightmare. (After you pay 30% more, mind you!)

You cannot do stuff like “we’re sorry for your trouble, would you like 3 months free or a full refund?”

5. Asking ppl why they cancel. NOPE! Not even after they cancel
Read 13 tweets
Apr 22
Every now and then there's this prediction of when we will see the first one billion dollar company ran by one person...

... and I think back to how in 2016 there was this one product inside Uber that had crossed a $1B annual run rate that had a total of one dev allocated to it.
And half a data scientist (part-time).

It was cash.

Funny how headcount games can work inside fast-growing companies, especially when the product is a stated goal of what a founder does NOT want to support (but turns out to be essential!)
I only have second-hand details here but the story was along the lines of not being able to get official headcount (because when Uber was founded, no cash and no tipping were table stakes).

It only got funding after crossing the $1B landmark.

Was pretty incredible internally!
Read 4 tweets
Apr 11
From an eng manager at a full remote company:

"We just fired an engineer after ~15 days on the job who lacked basics skills on the job but aced the interview - clearly, using cheat tools.

He admitted to how he did it: he used iAsk, ChatGPT and Interview Coder throughout"
(I personally talked with this person and know them well)

This company hired full remote without issue for years: this is the first proper shocker they have.

They are changing their process, of course. In-person interviews, in-part likely to be unavoidable.
As a first change, they have started to be lot more vigilant during remote interviews, and laying some "traps" that those using AI assistants will fall into.

Just by doing that they think about 10% of candidates are very visibly using these (they just stop interview processes with them)
Read 4 tweets
Apr 5
I am coming around to why MCP is so impressive.

For one of my side projects, I used to have to log onto my database admin (PgAdmin) to query stuff.

I connected an MCP server to Postgres and can "talk" with my database (and data!)

An uplevel in my productivity + ease of work.
Let me give an example of how cool this is:

I have a service that sends our promo codes for Perplexity and Kagi that paid newsletter members can claim:

I can now "talk" with the data from my IDE to get all kinds of details!

Was impossible until now newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/free-kagi-an…Image
Lots of questions on "which MCP did you use?"

I used Windsurf, but would work just as well with Cursor (and maybe VS Code as well now). Under the hood its all the same!

When setting up, took an hour to get it to work, thanks to my local npm + npx being out of date. Updated it and then worked fine.

The Windsurf MCP interface: just set up the Postgres one. But again behind the scenes its "just" an npm package that you can invoke from the command line as well! Which is the beauty of itImage
Read 6 tweets
Apr 4
I'm starting to understand why there are company eng blogs not worth reading.

When doing a deepdive on an interesting company in @Pragmatic_Eng, we do research, talk with engineers, then share the draft back for any minor corrections. Usually it's a "LGTM." But sometimes:
Sometimes the Comms or Brand team gets actively involved, and mistakenly assume they are the editors, and attempt to rewrite the whole thing on how they would usually publish it on eg their blog.

Every time, it's a disaster to see, but also amusing. Because a good article becomes SO bad. Interesting details removed, branding elements added etc.

(We never allow edits - and if they insist we simply publish nothing, throwing out our research. This has not yet happened, but it might be the first time it will)
Btw here are some of the deepdives we did. In most cases, it was a "LGTM"

In other cases, we rejected edit attempts... because its not their engineering blog!

(The bigger the company the more sterile those edits can become, in general, btw.)

newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/t/engineering-…
Read 5 tweets
Apr 4
One thing that really bugs me about VCs and others projects claiming how AI will mean many devs redundant because smaller teams can do more with less: is ignoring the last.

Some of the most impactful / successful software was built by tiny teams in the 80s, 90s, 2000s. Like:
Microsoft’s first product in 1975 years ago: 2 devs

Quake in 1996: 9 devs

Google’s first search engine in 1998: 4 devs

We could go on.

Small teams with outstanding people doing great things happened before GenAI and will happen after as well (and without as well!)
What happened in all cases was the product got traction and there was more stuff to do that needed more outstanding people! So they hired more standout folks

The same will happen with GenAI: companies taking off thanks to using AI tools will hire more devs who can help them get more stuff done *using the right tools*. Some of those tools will be GenAI - but some of it not!
Read 7 tweets

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