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Gergely Orosz Profile picture
@GergelyOrosz
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

Gergely Orosz Profile picture
Oct 1
My personal anecdote on the impact of AI (aka Claude Code + Cursor)

There was this tool I wanted to build that would have helped my business a little bit at @Pragmatic_Eng, but not enough to

1. Do it myself (would have taken ~days)
2. Hire someone (too much onboarding)

But...
... but then I gave it a go with Claude Code + Cursor open.

In 30 minutes, I had something promising. In an hour, I got it done, exactly how I wanted (this was an addition to my existing codebase.) In another hour, I moved it over to a new stack I've been wanting to play with!
... and now it's done, and I've onboarded the first company on to this feature.

Here's the thing without this AI tool, I don't think I would have EVER done it! Not worth it.

So I think AI tools will do this. People + companies doing stuff they wouldn't have, before!
Read 9 tweets
Gergely Orosz Profile picture
Sep 24
Linear has a 30-minute weekly meeting called "Quality Wednesdays." I sat through one and WOW

Devs show a quality or perf-related fix they did last week. It can be big, or small. We went through 17 issues, from massive backend performance wins, to this tiny one. Can you see it? Image
On one end, it was super casual. On the other, it was really dense.

A dev spent 2 minutes showing how because styled-components *feels* slow, they tried out 3 other frameworks & measured how they compare for build time, JS bundle size, CSS size, and LCP rendering performance.

Based on this, they'll probably move off styled components... mainly for LCP rendering for massive pages to be faster. But it's all tradeoffs.
And it could really be *anything.* Some devs showed work they picked up as reported by users that resulted in higher quality.

Most devs though found a small thing or two to fix last week. That first bug (off by 1px) was found and fixed by a frontend engineer.

Lots of small but irritating things fixed like moving the mouse over an element takes a small delay to show the tooltip, or the tooltip first shows as empty etc
Read 9 tweets
Gergely Orosz Profile picture
Jul 27
Amusing use of LLMs at a more traditional company:

“A project with ~50 people got stuck. There are too many JIRA tickets, no clear specification, and anytime one team tries to make progress, the others shoot it down.

So a dev built an LLM to try and break the deadlock: (cont’d)
- Fed all JIRA tickets to the LLM. Built a basic RAG with vector DB

- Had it generate questions about the project, about topics not covered by the tickets

- Had the LLM attempt to answer the same questions

- Generated a report of what areas are not specified

- Tried to use this to stop teams rejecting suggestions “because this is not well specified”
A PM at this company told me this story. Asked him if this LLM helped break the deadlock? His response:

“No. We’re still stuck. But it was good fun to build it and an excuse to play around with vector databases!”

Ha.
Read 5 tweets
Gergely Orosz Profile picture
Jul 13
Regarding the Windsurf sale (part of the team acquihired by Google, prob a great exit, but not all the team):

I feel we’re forgetting well-funded startups today are NOT scrappy startups in the past where employees work for pennies, paid well under market.

Its a different game
What is true, and always has been true: founders and decision makers always have the biggest potential upside - for anything! Including negotiating and acquisition.

This is why so many accomplished employees eventually become founders - because its hoe you have more control of your destiny
It still stings to have some people get much better outcomes during an acquisition.

It’s a reminder that as an employee, you really don’t have leverage beyond hoping founders look out for you… sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t
Read 7 tweets
Gergely Orosz Profile picture
Jul 9
There was this engineer on my team a while back who was: a good dev, but not the best dev. Got everything done. But had zero ego, a very nice personality, and got along with *everyone* on the team very well.

When he joined, the team became... better. Nicer. More balanced.
I just got a reference check about this dev, asking the usual questions ("what is an example where they delivered over and beyond," "how did they execute", "what are growth areas" etc)

He did fine on all of them, but I still think how much better he made my team. With stuff that's hard/impossible to measure!
Makes me realize how hiring is not focused on this stuff: "how would this person make the team better."

I guess, it is hard to be focused on this.

But this was one of the *very* rare devs who made every team much better. Nicer. More motivated. More a "team."

Still think of it
Read 7 tweets
Gergely Orosz Profile picture
Jun 30
So predictable that we’ll see an explosion of digital products selling “ideas for million dollar businesses” that you can “just vibe code quickly”.

Basically: “buy my digital product for $500, spend $1,500 on Lovable / Claude Code and become a millionaire.”

Another hype train
Ofc these products promoted by influencers will work just as well as crypto sh*tcoins launched by influencers in 2023.

We’ll see doctored evidence (“someone who built one of ideas idea is at $5K MRR after 2 weeks”) and nontechnical people will spend thousands for $0 in return
The predictable winners: AI infra companies! Lovable, Vercel (with v0), Claude Code, Cursor, Replit, Gemini and any and all products that (at least partially) position themselves as “AI tools to build your idea that work even if you’re not a developer”

And it’s stated. A gold rush where - and the surest winners are those selling the shovels!
Read 6 tweets

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