Tech Conference Faked Female Speakers to Look Diverse – BEST OF TANGOTI

Summary

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Podcast Summary

Podcast: There Are No Girls on the Internet
Host: Bridget Todd (with guest Mike)
Episode: Tech Conference Faked Female Speakers to Look Diverse – BEST OF TANGOTI
Release Date: January 30, 2026

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Main Theme

This episode explores the surreal and troubling scandal where the DevTurnity tech conference created fake female speakers, complete with AI-generated photos and bios, to project a falsely diverse lineup. Bridget Todd and her guest, Mike, dissect how this scandal not only exposes the tech industry’s superficial approach to diversity but also serves as a larger warning about fake personas proliferating on the internet, and the damage they cause to marginalized voices.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Context: The DevTurnity Scandal

• Background: DevTurnity, a pricey developer conference run by Edward Sizoff since 2015, was outed in 2023 for having fake female speakers and even a co-founder, bolstered by AI-generated photos and fabricated bios.
• Why It Matters: The incident exemplifies how efforts to address diversity can devolve into empty, deceptive gestures—and how tech may be uniquely vulnerable to such “catfish” scams as AI-generated personas proliferate.

2. How the Scam Was Exposed

• Discovery: Software engineer Gergely Orosz (!), suspicious of the speaker list, realized two women listed as Coinbase employees didn’t exist anywhere else online ([05:01]).
  • Quoting his findings:

    “Imagine my surprise that two of those women are fake profiles. They do not exist. Nada.” — Bridget Todd recounting Gergely’s tweet ([05:51])

• Evidence: Gergely traced profiles back to earlier years, found they’d reused the same “This Person Does Not Exist” AI headshots, and exposed the ease with which anyone could verify the fraud by checking GitHub logs ([10:22]).

3. “Inclusion” as Surface-Level PR

• Superficial Diversity: The show analyzes how the fake women were added immediately after a Twitter call-out for the lack of diversity—mere hours after the complaint ([08:21]).
• Host Theory:
  • Bridget speculates people didn’t catch on earlier because organizers (and possibly attendees) “didn’t value” the women speakers—hence, few checked who they even were ([11:52]).

4. Conference Response & Excuses

• Edward Sizoff’s Response:
  • He deflects blame, attacks the whistle-blower as “seeking clout,” and uses incendiary language:

    “...damaging my life’s work and reputation…Nothing good, only harm.” ([16:42])
    “The amount of hate and lynching I keep receiving is as if I would have scammed or killed someone.” ([23:32])

• Absurd Defenses: He claims the fake profiles were “demo personas” meant to be replaced, but had no time for a “quick fix” ([19:46]), a contradiction, as the website was updated to remove the fakes within a day of being exposed ([22:43]).
• Deflection to Cancel Culture: Sizoff blames “cancel culture” for the fallout, painting himself as a victim ([23:31]).

5. Impact on Real Participants

• Legitimate Female Speakers: Some were indeed real, but their inclusion was used to shield the broader fraud ([20:26]).
• Male Allies React:
  • Scott Hanselman and others withdrew from the conference in protest—Hanselman, for example, insists on inclusive lineups and said he felt “duped” himself ([24:32]).
• Reputational Fallout: The scandal led to the conference's cancellation, highlighting how such frauds can backfire ([28:25]).

6. Julia Krishina / Coding Unicorn: The “Catfished” Co-Founder

• The Influencer Persona:
  • Julia’s “Coding Unicorn” Instagram amassed 120,000 followers with staged photos—coded as a tech-world "booth babe," often copying content from Sizoff’s own accounts ([30:21], [36:18]).
  • In 2020, Julia was featured in a “Women in Tech” blog, allegedly responding via email—never seen, only scripted by Sizoff ([31:25]).
• Persona Red Flags: Julia’s answers downplay gender bias (“men suffer from biases equal to women”) and always conveniently side with a male-supremacist mindset ([32:25]).
  • Bridget’s verdict:

    “Tell me that does not sound like a fantasy version of a woman working in tech… She reads like a woman invented by a man.” ([32:21])

• The Deeper Lie: Social media and site data show photos swapped over years, Sockpuppeting, and that not even the same model appeared throughout—a constructed identity ([36:18]).

7. Analyzing the Motivation

• Financial & Social Grift:
  • Julia/Coding Unicorn is used to hype Sizoff’s own events, boosting ticket sales and promoting paid masterclasses ([49:24]).
  • Yet, the hosts see a deeper driver: a desire for “clout,” status as a tech influencer, and the intoxicating feedback of a large (mostly male) fanbase ([49:55], [52:32]).
• Misogyny & Male Fantasy:
  • Julia’s persona caters to male fantasies of the tech “cool girl” who is competent, sexy, not a feminist, and never “makes things awkward” ([41:15], [44:52]).
  • The account, Bridget argues, “is for men,” not for actual uplift of women in tech ([44:52]).

8. Larger Implications

• Harm to Marginalized Communities:
  • Such scams reinforce skepticism toward all marginalized participants (especially trans and gender non-conforming folks), further entrenching barriers for actual diversity ([55:47]).
  • Programs meant for genuine inclusion get derailed, and bad actors weaponize the fallout to argue that diversity has “gone too far” ([57:32]).
• False Scarcity Narrative:
  • Sizoff claims “thousands of events chasing the same small subgroup of women,” but the hosts debunk this—real work to find marginalized voices isn’t that hard ([54:10]).
  • Quoting Valerie Phoenix (@valeriephoenix):

    “Every grifter and catfish story we push for engagement overshadows marginalized individuals’ real struggles and victories in tech.” ([54:05])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the superficiality of fake inclusion:

  “Maybe it didn’t even register to be looking at [the women speakers] all that closely because maybe they just didn’t value them in the same way.” — Bridget Todd ([11:52])

• Describing Julia, the fake influencer:

  “She’s not a feminist. She doesn’t think that women have any societal disadvantages because of their gender. She has a dirty mouth… She describes herself as a free thinker… No, it’s Joe Rogan, of course.” — Bridget Todd ([41:15]–[41:27])

• Summing up the scam’s insult to both women and men:

  “It is not only incredibly insulting to women, it is also incredibly insulting to men… Like, they are so stupid and horny that if you create a fictional version of their own fantasy… they will be invested and also believe that person actually exists.” — Bridget Todd ([48:59])

• Calling out the cynicism of “diversity” for show:

  “Somehow this elaborate catfish AI-generated scam to him was less work than just like widening your network of marginalized people.” — Bridget Todd ([54:10])

• Impact on real communities:

  “We already have to prove we belong… now prove that we exist, that we’re actually humans.” — Bridget Todd ([57:32])

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Important Timestamps

• [03:31] – Introduction to the DevTurnity conference and the initial red flags.
• [05:51] – How Gergely Orosz uncovered the scam and started compiling evidence.
• [08:21] – Coincidence of fake women being added right after a public call-out for lack of diversity.
• [10:22] – Use of AI-generated headshots from "This Person Does Not Exist."
• [19:46] – Sizoff’s excuses about fake profiles being “demos.”
• [23:32] – Sizoff’s melodramatic cancel-culture defense.
• [24:32] – Responses of real speakers (Scott Hanselman’s and David Heinemeier Hansson’s withdrawal).
• [30:21] – Who is Julia “Coding Unicorn”? A fabricated influencer.
• [32:25] – “Julia’s” advice on gender bias betrays her invented perspective.
• [41:15] – Dissecting the fantasy: The male-engineered “cool girl” of tech.
• [44:52] – Bridget: The account “is for men,” not for representing women in tech.
• [48:59] – Analysis of the scam’s mutual insult: degrading both men and women.
• [54:10] – False scarcity, real consequences, Valerie Phoenix quote.
• [57:32] – The ever-rising bar for real marginalized people to be “proven real.”
• [59:26] – Final notes on fake branding vs. real building.
• [60:52] – Where are they now? DevTurnity and the “Julia” account go quiet.

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Tone and Style

The episode’s tone is sharply critical, irreverent, and humorous—often dropping pop culture references and snappy one-liners, but always grounding the analysis in a genuine concern for marginalized people’s experiences in tech. Bridget and Mike bring a combination of insider knowledge, investigative curiosity, and candid frustration to the subject.

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Conclusion

This episode skewers the shallowness, misogyny, and grifting possible in tech’s “diversity” theater. By faking female inclusion rather than investing in real marginalized voices, DevTurnity’s organizers not only scammed would-be attendees but devalued genuine efforts toward equity and representation. The story serves as a warning: true inclusion cannot be manufactured with AI, fake personas, or cynical branding. Building authentic, diverse communities requires real work—and respect for those long overlooked.

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For more episodes and resources, visit: TANGOTI website
Feedback or tips: [e-mail]

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Transcript

[Bridget Todd]

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[Bridget Todd]

A good tech scam. Not the kind that hurts people, but the kind that reveals just how much smoke and mirrors holds the tech industry together. Case in point, in 2023, a tech conference called DevTurnity got caught faking female speakers with potentially fake photos and fabricated bios. Now, at the time, it just seemed like a kind of embarrassing anomaly. We covered it on the show, had a very good laugh, and pretty much moved on. But today, in 2026, with fake AI generated Personas flooding the Internet and being used for everything from marketing to election interference, it looks less like a one off scandal and more like a warning we should have heeded. So today, let's revisit the story of Dev Trinity and why fake Personas are the tech problem that nobody's taking ser.

[Mike]

Enough.

[Bridget Todd]

I'm not saying this woman doesn't exist. I'm just saying she reads like a woman written by a man. There are no girls on the Internet. It's a production of iHeartRadio and unbossed creative. I'm Bridget Todd and this is There are no girls on the Internet. So I feel like Christmas has kind of come a little bit early for me because, Mike, as you know, not only am I deeply fascinated by identity and technology, but also I am deeply fascinated by my other true love, which is scams. You know this about me. I love a good scam. I love scam content. Scam, podcasts, give me all the scams. I mean, don't scan me, but I, I want to be not involved in the scam and then hear about how the scam unfolded so I can be like, oh, that's how they did it.

[Mike]

Yeah, you're love of scams and catfishing is legendary. No doubt.

[Bridget Todd]

So catfishing is a scam that I am specifically interested in. And this wild story that was blowing up on Twitter last week involves all three identity and technology scams and catfishing. And as fascinating as I find all of these, I also think it's really a story that tells us a lot about how people actually think about marginalized folks and technology. Like, do they actually see us when they see us? Do they respect us when they actually do include us? Is that inclusion a gimmick? Is it done to take the heat off criticism? Like, why is it done? And when they try to include us and get it so, so, so wrong, what does that tell us too? So let's talk about devtornity. So devtornity is a Tech conference for developers that attendees have to pay from as little as $435 up to $870 to attend. It was founded by Edward Sizzoff in 2015. So this conference had been called out for not having a very diverse lineup of speakers. Like, most of their speakers tended to be white men. And to deal with that, Edwards, the organizer, allegedly decided to flesh out their lineup by tapping into the existing pool of really talented, marginalized people who have been building and shaking things up in tech for a very long time. Oh, wait, no, no, no. That's not what he did. That would be a normal thing to do. What he actually did was flesh out that lineup by creating AI generated women speakers to add to the lineup. And as if that's not bad enough, like, that's already pretty bad, it doesn't stop there, because in addition to creating those phony women to speak at his conference, it was also revealed that that Edwards had been running this entire, like, fake female tech influencer Catfish Enterprise, and had been doing so for years. Unsurprisingly, the entire thing was full of drama. And honestly, like, I don't think I have ever seen anything unfold quite like this in the space before. So let's get into it. So this all started when engineer Gurgly Orzos was looking into the lineup at Dev Trinity. After a couple of his colleagues were asked to speak there, he started looking into the lineup and became a little bit suspicious of two of the women speakers listed. So these two women speakers had been listed as coming from a pretty prominent tech company, Coinbase, which is like a cryptocurrency exchange platform. Anna Boyko, who was on the speaker's page, listed as a staff engineer at Coinbase. And Natalie, Natalia. Sometimes it's Natalie, sometimes it's Natalia Stadler, who was listed as a software craftswoman at Coinbase. So one of these women who was listed as working at Coinbase said that she was also affiliated with Ethereum, a type of cryptocurrency. And Gurkley was like, it's a little bit odd that somebody would be speaking at a conference representing both Coinbase, a cryptocurrency platform, and also a type of cryptocurrency. He was like, that didn't seem right to me. So he got suspicious and looked into it, and that's when he found that these women did not seem to exist. They don't have any kind of social presence beyond what appears on the conference website. Gurguley tweeted, imagine a tech conference having no call for proposals. As they reach out to speakers directly, they successfully attract some of the most heavy hitter male speakers in tech and three women speakers. Now imagine my surprise that two of those women are fake profiles. They do not exist. Nada. So I gotta really give it to Gurgley here. He must have sniffed out that something was fishy and then like just held it. Like nursed it like a grudge and held onto it like a dog with a bone because dude did his homework. He found web archives that go back to 2021 that list these two non existent women as speakers at the eternity. One of them also spoke or at least was listed as a speaker back in 2022 as well. In the aftermath of all this, Gurgley really did some deep digging. He found a tweet from 2021 publicly calling out the conference for having a mostly male lineup. On August 3, 2021, Maddie Stratton, a director of developer relations, tweeted, good thing I'm not tweeting about tech this week or else I might have to call out DevTurnity for pretty much having all white dudes as speakers. Given who they listed at the top, it doesn't surprise me at all. So then Julia Krishina, also known as Coding Unicorn, who calls herself one of the conference co founders, replies, remember Julia's name because she is going to become important. Later, Julia replies to Maddie's tweet saying, hi Matt, Julia from the Devtrinity team here. Thanks for raising this. Out of the 14 invited female speakers, three confirmed, two canceled as we had to postpone to survive. Covid, there is a lot to improve so you can advise on how to make the lineup better. Let's chat. I'll send you a DM. So this very same day that Maddie calls out DevTurnity for having an all male lineup, August 3rd, 2021 is when DevTornity also coincidentally adds their very first fake woman speaker. Like I said, Gurgley brought receipts. The Devturnity conference website has a public GitHub repo. GitHub is a place online where developers can show other folks what they're working on, where you could see the full edit history of the conference website. So he included a screenshot showing the specific changes to the website and the date of those changes confirms that Natalia Slattery, software craftswoman at Coinbase, was added a few hours after Maddie's complaint of the lack of diversity of the conference. Two hours to be exact. In that edit, Julia, the conference co founder, was also added to the speaker's lineup So I don't know. That seems pretty suspicious. Like that timing. I don't know.

[Mike]

If you're gonna make up fake people, why have all the changes to your website be publicly on GitHub?

[Bridget Todd]

Gurgley also found that another one of the fake women added to the lineup's headshot was taken from this person does not exist. Which is a site that randomly generates pictures of non existent people generated by AI. Which is like, pretty funny that the place where he got these pictures really spells out what's going on. This person does not exist. Overall, Gurgley found four non existent people who are all women listed as speakers on this conference website. Since they were called out for their lack of women speakers back in 2021, Gurgley writes on his website, I decided to share that this conference advertises fake speakers and has done so for years. This statement is easily verifiable by anybody in the same way that I did. I have not seen this type of deceit at any other conference and I've seen enough that I didn't want to keep quiet. And honestly, like, I got major shout outs to Gurgley here. We will throw the piece on his website with all of his receipts in the show notes for folks to check out. You definitely should. But one of the questions that Gurgley does ask is that he got suspicious when he saw this lineup and that he doesn't believe that he is the only person who got suspicious. Like he doesn't think he was the only person to be like, looking these people up. These women were listed as working for very prominent tech companies. And so certainly somebody has like looked them up on LinkedIn or whatever for whatever reason is like, I'm the only person who decided to speak up about it, who didn't want to keep quiet. And even that to me is really interesting. Like, I don't know what's really going on there, but it almost makes me wonder if the vast majority of people at this conference didn't think the women speakers were worth really paying attention to. So let alone like investigating, throwing them into a quick Google search, whatever. Maybe they were just like, prominent male name in tech. Prominent male name in tech. Prominent male name in tech. Some useless chick. Some useless chick. Prominent male name in tech. Prominent male name in tech. Like maybe it didn't even register to them to be paying attention to the women speakers, what organizations they represented and what they were talking about. Maybe it didn't even register to be looking at them all that closely because like they, maybe they just like didn't value them in the same way. I don't know. That's just my theory because I do agree with Gurgley here that certainly he cannot be the first person to have uncovered this. And it did not take a very substantial amount of digging to find out that these people weren't necessarily real. So, like, what's going on?

[Mike]

I don't know. I feel like we encounter weird stuff online all the time and it's so easy to just chalk it up to like, maybe it's a scam or maybe the Internet is broken or maybe I don't understand.

[Bridget Todd]

Yeah, I mean, I would like to think that if I encountered this, I would have said something.

[Mike]

Would you have, would you have dug like Gurgly?

[Bridget Todd]

I would have dug for sure. If I. If I had sniffed out, like, I have a lot of time on my hands and I love to do a deep dive. So if I. If I had like sniffed out that something funky was going on, I probably would have looked into it. I think I'm the kind of person who might have, like, thought that I was misunderstanding something or that I was getting something wrong or misreading something. I respect that. Gurgley is the kind of person who was like, I am taking this to social media right away because something is not right.

[Mike]

Yeah, I appreciate that too. Kudos to Gurgly.

[Bridget Todd]

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Extra speeds may slow after 50 gigabytes per month when network is busy. See terms. And we're back. So Gurgley is pretty suspicious about some of these women speakers on the lineup. He does some Digging and decides to post about this on LinkedIn and Twitter, where the Devtornity Conference founder Edward Sizoff first tweets in response. So his response is probably one of the most dramatic but also nonsensical and explanations I have ever read in my life. It is super long. Like, it's still up on Twitter. If folks want to, we'll link to the whole thing. But like, I'm not going to read the whole thing here, but I will get into a couple of key bits. So first of all, Edward says that, oh no, it is not him who has done something wrong. He heavily implies that Gurgley must be the bad guy. Why? Because Gurgley took to social media to talk about this in the first place, rather than, I guess, like contacting him directly privately. Which means that Gurgley just wants attention. He just wants clout. He's jealous. He's trying to take me down. Edwards writes, I won't be responding directly to Mr. Orzov's accusation and won't even link to it here, given that he didn't even bother contacting me and sharing his concerns. He went straight to socials and using the power of his social network, shared all his assumptions without validating them, damaging my life's work and reputation. I don't know what his intention was, but harm has been done. Nothing good, only harm. So, yeah, it's Gurgley who is the bad guy, because Gurgli decided to ask what's happening to use his platform on social media to ask some really good questions that need answers. That alone is evidence of Gurgley being the bad guy and try being out to get Edwards. Edwards also uses some pretty choice language defending himself. He writes, I'll explain to you what happened and then you decide if my life's work and the upcoming event deserve to be ruined and I ought to be lynched. The use of the word lynched. There is a choice. It will not be the last time he uses that word to reference what's going on in the situation. So then he kind of gets into his explanation of what's going on, which is that basically it was a mistake, a mistake that he realized happened, but then just like didn't have time to fix. He says. So he claims that Natalie's name and profile was auto generated with a random title, random Twitter handle, and random picture, and that he realized that this was happening and it was a mistake, that he intended to fix it, but then he realized that it wasn't going to be a quick fix. And that quote it's better to have that demo Persona while I'm searching for replacement speakers. And first of all, like, I am no developer. So like, maybe it's not a quick fix, maybe it takes days to fix this. I cannot speak for whether or not that is true. It does sound like bullshit to me, but I don't know. But I have to say, even if that is true, like, even if what he said, we take him at his word, it is still in my book, pretty deceitful. Because you're asking people to pay $800 when you know the lineup that you are advertising publicly or could not possibly come to fruition. Like, what if I'm really interested in whatever this fake person Natalie has to say and her like her line of work and her expertise and I spend money, I plug down $800 to see her speak because I'm interested in her and you advertised her as a speaker. That would be deceitful. And it's interesting to me how he, in his like, explanation glosses over that so quickly.

[Mike]

Yeah, the deceitfulness here is definitely the worst part.

[Bridget Todd]

So he does say that the conference ended up having a less diverse than predicted lineup because these women who had agreed to speak all dropped out for reasons that he could not control. He writes, Sandy for health issues, Julia switched to helping the organization. You can't do both speaking and organization. Sandy and Julia didn't make it to the final schedule, but they kept appearing on the website while I was looking for a replacement. This partially led to an accusation that since they're not part of the schedule, we've probably added them just to meet arbitrary diversity criterias. This statement is bold and unfair. Sandy and Julia confirmed their participation. They should have been part of the final schedule, but dropped out for reasons out of our control at the worst possible time. Ask Sandy or Julia. So we ended up with only one female speaker, Chris. So while I was looking for a last minute replacement, hoping I'd find it, Sandy and Julia were still mentioned on the website. So I have to say some of these people did end up being real. Christine Howard, who is the head of developer relations at Amazon Web Services, confirmed a404Media that she had agreed to speak and that she does exist. Sandy Metz is a real person who 404 media confirmed did agree to speak and had to drop out because she was getting knee surgery. The conference founder keeps repeating this like very weird point in his defense that none of the fake women ever actually made it onto the final lineup. And I don't totally know what he means There. But I think that what he is saying is that even though these women weren't actually speaking and they were listed as speakers, they didn't actually show up to speak. And so like nobody was duped, but like, of course they didn't show up to speak. They're not real people.

[Mike]

It sounds like he's saying that Julia had to drop out because she was going to be on the organizing committee. And I'd never heard of that being a role that like if you're on the organizing committee, you can't speak at the conference. Like that's just not a thing that I've ever heard. So that doesn't make sense. And then he also says that she had to drop out due to circumstances beyond their control, but that circumstance was that she wanted to be an organizer rather than a speaker. So like, that also doesn't make sense.

[Bridget Todd]

No, none of it makes sense. His entire explanation is nonsensical to me. So after this whole thing went viral on Twitter, Edwards did remove the fake women from the website. So I guess apparently it ended up being a quicker fix than he had previously indicated. Like the reason why he said that he couldn't he was aware of this mistake on the website but couldn't fix it is because it was not a quick fix, but apparently quick enough that it could be taken care of within a day of this going viral on Twitter. Right?

[Mike]

And the fix was changing some copy on the website, which historically in most systems is a pretty quick fix.

[Bridget Todd]

It would take weeks. So lastly, from Edwards long Twitter explanation, you know who is really at fault here? Kenny Bess.

[Mike]

Society.

[Bridget Todd]

Society, according to Edwards, specifically cancel culture. He tweeted. I said it was a mistake, a bug that turned out to be a feature. I even fixed that on my website. We're cool, right? No, we want blood. Let's cancel this sinner. All caps. The amount of hate and lynching I keep receiving is as if I would have scammed or killed someone. But I won't defend myself because I don't feel guilty. I did nothing terrible that I need to apologize for. Side note, I'm not sure that Edward knows what lynching is like. I, I would like to sit him down and ask him what he thinks it entails. So not only is this in my opinion like deeply unethical behavior from the perspective of people being asked to pay 8 up to $800 to attend this, this conference with a fake lineup, it also really sucks for the other speakers. Scott Hanselman, who is a very well respected person in the space who Cares a lot about things like inclusion and diversity in tech, was slated to speak, but pulled out after all this happened. He tweeted, this whole conference debacle is so disappointing. Speakers like myself, when invited to a conference, will immediately say who all is going to be there. I have my rules for participation posted on my site, including an inclusive lineup. For years I was duped by fake speakers also. And so it's pretty bad when people who have made it their thing to use their. Like Scott Hanselman is a white man. The fact that he is someone who is like intentionally using his privilege and his reputation and his background to try to help inclusion in the space and like, do what he can to like make it more inclusive by saying, yeah, if you want me to speak at your event, it has to be inclusive. Giving that incentive for organizers to make their spaces inclusive. It doesn't work if these organizers just lie and just make up who is going to be on the lineup. David Heinemere Hanson, the creator of Ruby on Rails, was also slated to speak and pulled out. And he said that he asked for his name to be removed from the lineup website, a request that was not honored.

[Mike]

Oof.

[Bridget Todd]

I mean, I have to say, if I had all of these like big name, high profile people in the tech space dragging me like this, I would just be more. This is like, like I had nothing to do with this and I'm embarrassed for Edwards, you know, like, this would be mortifying to me.

[Mike]

From what I've seen poking around at like the DevTurnity website and Julia's coding unicorn Instagram account, it seems like they're. Edwards is really into devtornity. I mean, obviously it's his whole. Seems to be his whole professional gig, but it's just like the aesthetic trappings of coding, so far as I can tell. Like maybe there's more to it, but like the sense that one gets from looking at the social accounts is not that there's like deep important wisdom and new stuff being revealed at this conference, but it's really just aesthetics and social aspects of being a coder developer. And so the loss of these high profile people, that. That's got to like really sting, right? Because it seems like the whole thing is built on big names and credibility and star fucking.

[Bridget Todd]

So I want to get into that more in just a bit because I picked up on what you're saying too, and I think it, I think it goes quite a bit deeper than that, but specifically about the DevTurnity conference. In preparing for this episode, I too like poked around their website and their social and the video, like their sizzle reel that they have for the event. It basically is like devtornity. This is a conference. People attend, there are lanyards. Like, it's like what they're telling me is like, this is definitely a tech conference that people go to. Like they're not telling me what I will learn, what the space feels like, why I want to show up there. It's like they're more interested in the flash and surface appearance of a slick tech conference, but it feels completely surface level.

[Mike]

Yeah. And maybe we can talk about the name DevTurnity. What does that mean? One might say it doesn't mean anything.

[Bridget Todd]

One might even go further and say maybe it's a little bit fake.

[Mike]

Yeah, but it is a real name. It seems to be a blend of the words dev as in developer, and eternity, as in the time period that 13 year olds will pledge their undying love. I guess it's putting those things together with a fake Instagram account of a fake woman.

[Bridget Todd]

Well, you don't have to worry about that for too much longer because DevTurnity is canceled. Several speakers started dropping out after this happened and the event was meant to be in just a few days, so it's not happening. So even if it was just that, right? Like this would already be one of the weirdest stories I have ever heard happening at a tech conference. But as you hinted, it does not stop there. Because remember Julia Krishina, AKA Coding Unicorn, the conference co founder? So Julia was slated to be a speaker at devtrinity in 2021, 2022 and 2023. She was the person who was supposed to speak but then moved up to be an organizer. So she couldn't speak. We think that maybe that's BS but whatever. She is also a pretty established tech influencer. Her Instagram account called Coding Unicorn goes back to 2018. She has 120,000 followers on her account where her bio reads the best coding account on Instagram. Hi, my name is Julia. I am a professional software developer, posting, no BS coding career and productivity tips, and a devtornity fan. She's done your basic like influencer stuff. She does giveaways, raffles on her, on her platform, all that stuff. Her pictures show her presumably working on code and really looking hot, like showing a lot of cleavage and just generally kind of like being a tech hottie while really hyping up devtornity events and conferences. But. And here is the big reveal. She's not even real. It doesn't look like 404 Media looked into it, they found IP logs that seem to indicate Edwards inviting and then logging into an account belonging to Coding Unicorn, which is Julia's social media handle. So basically just like logging in as her a YouTube video posted last year by Edwards that had five views. When 404 Media accessed, it showed him logged into his own email account as well as one for Coding Unicorn. Many of Coding Unicorn's posts are just copied and pasted from Edwards, LinkedIn or Instagram without any attribution. Edwards also pretty explicitly admits that he is the one responsible for the Coding Unicorn account on his LinkedIn profile, saying I devote most of my time to growing the most popular coding account on Instagram with 120k followers coding unicorn without elaborating on exactly what that entails. So this is pretty confusing. I think it's time we heard from Julia herself. Hi everybody, it's Gordon Unicorn here. Do you want to become an awesome software developer, build a successful career, become more productive and happy? I'm here to help. In 2020, the tech company Hashnode published an interview with Julia on their Women in Tech blog. All about the issues that Julia faces being a woman working in a male dominated space. Now the person that wrote that article has confirmed with 404 media that the interview was conducted via email and they never actually spoke. Honestly, the interview kind of reads like bad hacker girl fan fiction. Here's a little taste of it. Julia, how'd you get into tech? Nine years ago my parents forced me to go to college and get a computer science degree. They wanted me to find a nice quiet office job because I was a problem kid, a school rebel. I didn't fulfill my parents dreams. I am still a rebel, but one with a computer science degree. So tell me that does not sound like a fantasy version of a woman working in tech. Like I'm a rebel. The reason why I became a programmer is because my parents were looking for me to settle down and find a nice quiet job to stay out of trouble.

[Mike]

Yeah, it sounds like something from the 90s movie Hackers, which by the way.

[Bridget Todd]

I was looking at a picture of the fashions from that movie. Matthew Lillard in the movie Hackers. Like the way that they had imagined how computer hackers dress in that movie is really something. I guess I'll just leave it at that. So in this interview when Julia is asked about gender bias in tech. Well surprise. Julia actually thinks that it's men who suffer the most when it comes to gender bias in tech. She says, I don't like seeing women as victims because such a mindset turns men into suspects. Men suffer from biases equal to women. Think of job interviews. We give too much attention to gender bias and appreciate other cognition biases such as doubt avoidance where we make an ill decision just to avoid uncertainty or reject a person that doesn't look nice enough. Julia's advice for women to deal with gender bias Stop blaming others for being biased and prove yourself. So yeah, it reads to me like this fantasy fictionalized version of a woman in tech who doesn't think that there's any kind of gender bias and is not even interested in talking about it. Certainly would not say that she has faced it herself and is only interested in improving herself. Like that just reads like a woman invented by a man. More After a quick break.

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[Bridget Todd]

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[Bridget Todd]

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[Bridget Todd]

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[Bridget Todd]

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[Mike]

Best case scenario, it's a risky move.

[Bridget Todd]

Yeah, it's risky. So I feel like Julia almost exists as this kind of fantasy woman that a man would cook up. Right. Heaving cleavage, beautiful, but also a really skilled programmer. She's not a feminist. She doesn't think that women have any societal disadvantages because of their gender. She has a dirty mouth and makes like pithy zingers about how people need to worry less about convention and worry more about leveling up their tech skills. She describes herself as a free thinker. In one post, she's talks about her favorite podcasts. Can you guess who she lists as her as one of her favorite podcasts?

[Mike]

Is it us? Did we make a list?

[Bridget Todd]

You know, we got a tech podcast here. No, it's Joe Rogan, of course, famous.

[Mike]

Tech podcaster Jo Rogan. She also likes Tim Ferriss, also noted developer.

[Bridget Todd]

And she does this thing where she photoshops herself into pictures with famous tech leaders. Like she has a picture of herself photoshopped with Elon Musk, another picture of herself photoshopped with Jeff Bezos. We actually found the source picture and it's like she just photoshopped herself over his ex wife.

[Mike]

Yeah, and it was like an iconic photo that was the go to photo for Jeff Bezos before they got divorced. Like, anyone who's seen a photo of Jeff Bezos in the 2010s, like, that was it.

[Bridget Todd]

Yeah, you really called it. You were like, I've seen this picture before. And you found it on reverse Google Image search very quickly. Side note, if anybody ever watches the MTV show Catfish, you know that that's like when somebody who thinks they're being catfished calls Nev Shulman. Pretty much the only thing he can do is like, let's reverse Google image search these pictures. It's like the one tool in his toolbox that he has. So if they're ever looking for a replacement host for that show, they could call us because we know how to do it too. So I think that Julia is like this caricature of a certain type of man's dream woman, or like the kind of thing that a male programmer might cook up in his head in his fantasy as a woman in tech. You know, if you've ever seen the movie Gone Girl, it's like the cool girl Persona but for tech, right? Like, she's cool. She doesn't. She's not a feminist, she has a foul mouth, loves Joe Rogan, thinks your sexist jokes are really cute, loves Elon Musk. Like, I'm not saying this woman doesn't exist. I'm just saying she reads like a woman written by a man in his head. And it really reminds me of something that an influencer with a very large male following once told me. She told me that if your audience is men, like, if you're trying to curate men as your audience and it's men who are consuming your content on Instagram, those men are imagining themselves with you. So you can't have like other men in your images. You can't have anything that would, that would ruin the illusion that they could be with you. You can't have that in your images. So I think whoever is running Julia's account, I think it's probably Edwards is doing so in this way that very much lets techie guys imagine that they could be traveling the world with this like beautiful, foul mouthed, nerdy woman who only wants to talk about leveling up her tech skills while wearing like a bikini, right? Like this Julia account is for men. Like, I think that when I first saw it I thought like, oh, this is an account that's trying to boost representation for women in tech. Looking at it again, it's like, no, no, this is an account for men. This is an account that is trying to be a place where male programmers gather. Like, come for the cheesecake cleavage shots. Stay for my pithy musings on programming and culture. One commenter on Julia's Instagram put it really well. They said, I thought this group is about programming, but it appears to be a group of horny dudes drooling over a girl that always pose right next to a laptop. Which I thought was really funny. So apparently me and that commenter are not the only ones who are suspicious. In a 2020 comment that Julia left on Hacker News, she actually spoke to the idea of people not thinking that she is real. But peep how she twists this around about making it a response to a dig about how women can't be programmers, not whether or not she exists at all. In her comment on Hacker News, she writes, as a female developer with 60k followers on Instagram, I went through all of this. Programmers don't look like that you're fake. Some dude writes on your content. Are you a model or a coder? Bullies are not the happiest people on the planet. Some of them have been harassed or bullied by their parents in schools, et cetera. I discovered the hard way. When I pay back with the hate, it makes me feel bad and also feeds their hate. The hardest and probably wisest solution is to respond with love to those unhappy folks or not responding at all. It's very hard, but it works. Now, keep in mind, Julia wrote this in a comment on another post on Hacker News. So that means that Edwards is likely, like, not just posting on Instagram as Julia, but also doing interviews and in comments across the Internet as Julia as well.

[Mike]

Whoa, this goes deep.

[Bridget Todd]

So I've gone through both Julia's account and Edwards account from the very beginning. Did a lot of scrolling. And here is my theory about what I think is going on. This is not. This is just my opinion. I think that Edwards at some point decided that he wanted to be like, an online tech influencer and market himself on social media as somebody who should be listened to when it comes to those kind of conversations. That kind of goes back to what you were saying, Mike, about how devtornity, it seems like a kind of shallow representation of a tech conference, right? I think that Edwards courted for himself that tech Persona guy. Like, I see it a lot on Twitter since Elon Musk took over. Somebody who was always trying to, like, maximize their games and like, gamify success and always giving you, like, eight rules for productivity, eight hacks for this. Like, things that aren't even necessarily about tech. Always, I think, like, like a general influencer on tech, but also life. Like, that's what I think that he wanted to be. Or he or he thought, like, I need to do this. It'll be successful for me if I do this. You know, not just about tech, but about what books to read, how to think about culture. So in 2016, Edwards Instagram is pretty normal, right? Like, it's pictures of his family, pretty normal pictures of himself. Pictures of himself with, like, a lightsaber from Star wars or with a Game of Thrones characters. But around 2018, his pictures sort of change. They become a lot more polished and a lot more influencery, for lack of a better word. He really is, like, marketing himself as a tech luminary. He's taking pictures of the books that he's reading. He's, you know, in captions, giving life advice about tech and life and leveling up. And I think that he must have done this for a little bit of time and maybe not so seen success or growth. And then sometime in 2018, he creates Julia's page. Now, the first few pictures on Julia's Instagram account, interestingly don't show Julia's face, right? They're just like disembodied body parts. Like, in one, it's a close up of her cleavage holding a book about programming called Elegant Objects up against her chest. In another, it's just her feet while she's like, got a laptop on her lap in some. In many of them, she's using her hands to obscure her face or like, has her face down. Honestly, I think that Covid was probably like beneficial to these people because in a lot of the images post Covid, you see Julia wearing a face mask. And so I think they were like, oh, great, we've got a reason to not show her face. And so, you know, at first I was thinking about how deeply insulting this entire thing is to women in tech. You know, this idea that says that being a woman in tech means like wearing a bikini that says GitHub on it and showing off your body while there's like a laptop vaguely in the background or whatever. But I also want to say that, like, not only is it incredibly insulting to women, it is also incredibly insulting to men. I think, like, I think that Edwards thinks that men are so horny and stupid that they won't even notice that it is not the same woman in every picture. Like, they are so stupid and horny that if you create a fictional version of their own fantasy that is just projecting their desires back at them, they will be invested and also believe that person actually exists.

[Mike]

So that's a lot of effort. What do you think he's getting out of all of this?

[Bridget Todd]

Well, first of all, I think this is partially just a good old fashioned financial scam. Julia is meant to hype up his own conferences and tech entities, right? Like she has devtornity in her bio next to a little heart. She often wears like Dev Trinity shirts and talks about how much she loves the conferences. People have to pay as much as $800 to go to these events that Julia hypes up to her 150,000 Instagram or 120,000 Instagram followers. Edwards also sells masterclasses. And so I think that Julia in some ways is just like having your own built in sexy tech influencer to hype up whatever the thing is that you're selling. And it's just like a straightforward financial grift. But I also think it doesn't stop there, because that wouldn't explain the effort that it takes to, like, comment as Julia on Hacker News. Right. To comment in articles as Julia. Right. Because that's a different thing. So I also think that there might be, like, a kind of clout that comes with being Julia, this attractive woman in technology. You know, I almost would feel differently if Edwards was, you know, if when he was asked to do an interview for a blog about women in tech, if he was like, oh, this is just a Persona. Like, I don't want to take up room. I don't want to take away a slot from another, an actual human woman in tech. But he did those interviews specifically about being a woman in tech, and he did them as Julia. He could have. It would have been pretty weird, but he could have been like, oh, well, this is what I've learned as a man running an account as a woman Persona in tech. Like. Like, there are all kinds of things he could have done that I feel like I would be looking at it a little bit less side ie. But he didn't do any of those things. And so I think there must be, like, an element to this that must be fun. Like, it's probably fun to see your following and reach grow. Like, I think that he. If he was unable to be a tech influencer when he's just like, some guy when he's a sexy woman, certainly it's easier to grow an audience of programmer men when you're a sexy woman. And I think it probably is fun and intoxicating to see your following and reach grow. So I think that Julia allowed for Edwards to be the tech influencer that he never got to be as himself, that he never would be as himself, because his musings aren't really that novel. They're not really that good. Right? Saying if you're listing a list of podcasts for folks to check out, and top three, is Joe Rogan the most popular podcaster in the world? I'm sorry, that's not really novel advice. If the books that you're suggesting people read are books like Atomic Habits. I'm sorry, that book is in every airport in the country. These are not novel takes. This is not novel advice. I think that he's somebody who wanted the shine of being a tech luminary, somebody who could give sage wisdom that people, when he spoke, people would listen. But I don't think he had that in him. And so I think that doing it as Julia was the only way that he could do it and actually make an impact, which is actually kind of sad when you think about it that way.

[Mike]

It makes a lot of sense when you say it like that. The thing that I just have to keep wondering is, what was the bigger thing for him? What was the bigger piece of the motivation? Was it the financial grift and cosplaying Julia was just the way to get the following that would allow him to sell tickets to, like, make the financial grift work? Or was the bigger motivation being part of that cool kids club of tech guys who talk about their agile practices and post changes to their website to GitHub for some ridiculous reason?

[Bridget Todd]

If I, I mean, I don't. We'll have to ask Edwards. I would happily interview him. If he wants to do the interview, ask Julia.

[Mike]

We'll.

[Bridget Todd]

We'll figure that out. But no, I. I think it. I think it's gotta be the latter. I. I think that, like, especially in tech, I think that's a currency. I think getting to feel like you're somebody who people listen to, it feels good. And I think that it's a space where, I mean, I think it's a space where people are like, when you're a guy, a lot of guys who are like, pretty mediocre rise to that get to have those kinds of platforms. And I think that he probably just saw some of those guys and was like, why not me? And so I think, I think it's gotta be. I think the grift was probably part of it, but I think, in my opinion, not the only part. And I think that, you know, as weird of a story as this is, I do think it all goes back to this persistent myth that there are no women in tech. It's the myth that I started this podcast to bust. You know, like, Edwards was quoted as saying that the real problem is that there are not enough women out there that he could book to speak, and that tech conferences are all chasing this very small group of women. And that's the problem. He said there have been thousands of events chasing the same small subgroup of women speakers. And that to me, like, that reveals to me a really just messed up way of understanding and thinking about marginalized people in technology. If you truly believe that, how it works is there's a small handful of people that go to every conference that speak at every. They're on every stage, and that every conference is just like, booking those same people. That, to me signals that, like, first of all, you don't really know the space because that's just it makes me laugh. But second of all, you don't really care. You don't really care about uplifting marginalized voices. You maybe have gleaned that in 2023. You can't have a lineup of all white men at a tech conference without somebody saying something about it. And so you know that you need to not have people saying something about it, but you don't really care beyond that. And I think it also shows to me that he didn't think it was worth it to do the real work. Like somehow this elaborate catfish AI generated scam to him was less work than just like widening your, your, your network of, of marginalized people. And honestly, it's like other conferences manage to do that work of lifting up actual marginalized humans who exist in the space without inventing fake people. Right? Valerie Phoenix, the founder of Tech by Choice, which is a group that highlights underestimated people in tech, really put it well on Twitter. Valerie says the last few days have felt like a slap in the face to many of us who expect whose experiences are seen as cosplay for engagement. I've dedicated countless hours to running Tech by Choice, a nonprofit focused on helping underrepresented groups thrive in tech through education, resources and mentorship. It's never been about engagement, status or power. It's about making a difference. Every grifter and catfish story we push engagement towards overshadows marginalized individuals real struggles and victories in tech. And I guess that's really how I feel like there's are so many women and trans folks and non binary folks and queer folks and black folks and people of color in this space that the and these kind of stunts just like further complicate that experience for us even more. This might be a bit of a tangent, but I did want to talk about it because I remember we talked about the Grace Hopper conference and how CIS men showed up and like overran this conference that was specifically supposed to be a place for women in tech. And one of the things that we did not talk about in that episode that is absolutely true, that actually a listener correctly called me out on not raising in that episode is that a climate where men are taking opportunities like this away from marginalized people really also hurts gender, non conforming folks, trans folks, people who are butch or masc. So it creates this climate where people feel like they need to be suspicious of these folks when these are the same people who should be feeling comfortable and included in these spaces. Right. It creates the conditions where folks feel like even more surveilled and Watched and sidelined and pushed out of these spaces where they really ought to be included. And so stunts like this one just make it harder for actual marginalized people, humans who exist in tech. You know, we already have to prove we belong, prove we aren't fake, prove we are real, prove we're in tech, prove we know what we're doing, and now prove that we exist, that we're actually humans. Like, I've actually already seen men on Twitter saying that. This whole catfish thing just proves, like, what happens when people focus too much on diversity. So this whole debacle of a man doing something bad is already being used to further marginalize and punish people who are already marginalized in tech. Like, it never ends. And I think it really is important that, like, inclusion is not something that you do for points or clout or to get followers to your fake account or to grift or to avoid getting called out. It really matters. Like, we've talked about this across several episodes. It matters that our spaces where technology is being built include as many voices as they can. It matters for all of us. And so I think that people like Edwards just don't get it right. They just see it as this cosmetic thing that you can use to boost your own credibility and that it really hurts. It hurts. It hurts that this is how they see us. It really does.

[Mike]

It also seems like it's not clear what Edwards is actually building. So the idea that, like, you'll build it better if you have more diverse viewpoints in the room, like, you'll end up with a better product. I'm not sure he would get that because it's not clear, like, what he has built other than, like, a scammy conference.

[Bridget Todd]

Yes. And I think, again, it goes back to your point of using the veneer of, like, tech bro, just to build your personal brand, not to build anything real, Anything that matters. And, yeah, I just. I don't like it. I don't think. I don't think it serves us when that is seen as a currency. I don't think it serves us. So I wanted to end with a little bit of a. Where are they now? So Edwards has been pretty quiet on Twitter after this whole thing unfolded. His last tweets are still his tweets about being canceled. And, you know, his. His weird explanations. From November 25, the Deferity Conference is canceled. As for Julia, well, on November 17, she hinted that maybe she's reexamining her priorities and might be spending less time on Instagram. Instagram on her last post on November 17th saying I started posting less on Instagram since my life priorities have changed significantly. Or maybe I'm just getting older. So maybe we'll be hearing a little bit less from Julia on Instagram. Got a story about an interesting thing in tech or just want to say hi. You can reach [e-mail] you can also find transcripts of for today's [e-mail] there are no Girls on the Internet was created by me, Bridget Todd. It's a production of iHeartRadio and unbossed creative. Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer. Tari Harrison is our producer and sound Engineer Michael Amato is our contributing producer. I'm your host, Bridget Todd. If you want to help us grow, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, check out the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

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[Bridget Todd]

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