DevTernity (IT Conference)

2023: Conference organizers create fake speakers from prominent companies but fail

At the end of November 2023, the organizers of the annual DevTernity IT conference announced the cancellation of the event. The reason was the scandal that erupted after it became known that non-existent speakers from well-known companies were announced as speakers.

DevTernity is Latvia's largest international software conference, focusing on software architecture and development experience. The event has been held since 2015. In 2023, it was supposed to be held online on December 7-8, but shortly before the start, the organizers unexpectedly announced that the conference would not take place.

Organizers of the annual DevTernity IT conference announced the cancellation of the event

Gergely Orosz, developer and host of the popular Pragmatic Engineer newsletter, found fabricated profiles of female speakers on DevTernity's speaker list. One of these non-existent participants was a certain Anna Boyko, who is allegedly an employee Coinbase and one of the main specialists of the project. Ethereum Another non-existent speaker is Alina Prokhoda, who is represented as a specialist Microsoft and senior engineer. WhatsApp Oros also claims to have discovered fake female profiles on speaker lists at previous DevTernity conferences.

After the falsification was revealed, many well-known developers and programmers refused to participate in DevTernity 2023, saying that this practice is unacceptable because it is misleading and strikes at the reputation of women working in the IT field.

What a strange story. Never seen anything like it in decades of conference appearances. I refuse to participate in the event, "said David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of the popular Ruby on Rails web framework.[1]

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