Cancel culture row blights elite devcon

Conference in jeopardy after speakers pull out

A conference headlined by superstar software developers has been mired in accusations that it used fake female personas to make its event seem gender-inclusive, because big-name speakers would have shunned an all male line up.

Headline speakers started dropping out of the DevTernity conference over the weekend after tech newsletter writer Gergely Orosz posted his accusations on social media. One told Computing the event organisers had cancelled it, with only a week now before it was due to commence online.

Senior software engineers supported Liz Fong-Jones, CTO at honeycomb.io, in declaring that women would not speak at any conference alongside Robert C Martin, a 70-year-old influential software developer who has spoken out against cancel culture and in defence of free speech.

Some speakers who dropped out of the event told Computing that they would not stand for a conference organiser that had fake personas in its line-up, regardless of the organisers explanation that it was a silly mistake.

"It's far from what we wanted"

DevTernity conference organiser Eduards Sizovs said in a defence against the accusations on X/Twitter that the fake speaker was a demo persona from his test website that he noticed had slipped through, that he knew needed fixing, but it would be difficult, and he was busy. He was trying to find a real woman to fill the speaker slot, but it was proving difficult.

"There have been 1000s of events chasing the same small sub-group of female speakers," he wrote. "Despite our attempts, we've achieved a worse-than-expected level of diversity of speakers. It's far from what we wanted."

The conference web page was organised so that it adjusted the programme dynamically with the width of the browser window, so that it displayed rows of names and photos in multiples of 24 - the total number of speakers intended to appear.

But Fong-Jones, Orosz and tech news website 404Media accused Sizovs of creating another fake persona: a glamorous female software developer with her own Instagram account and a speaking slot at his conference. She pulled out at the last minute. They gathered evidence asserting that Julia Kirsina, though a real person and apparently an employee of Sizovs' conference firm, was in her online guise merely a sock-puppet for Sizovs: a persona really inhabited by Sizovs himself. Her inspirational Instagram messages for young female coders were actually written by him, they said.

Sizovs had not addressed that accusation at the time this article was written and did not respond when asked to comment on it.

Kristine Howard, head of developer relations at Amazon Web Services, had been the one remaining female speaker on the conference programme after Kirsina and another genuine female software engineer pulled out. Howard told Computing she had pulled out of the conference, that Sizovs told her it was cancelled, and that she didn't want to get involved in the controversy.

Superstar software developer David Heinemeier Hansson told Computing that he resigned from the conference line-up because Sizovs had crossed a red-line with even the little he had admitted so far.

"I can't offer any support. He admitted to using fake profiles "while looking for other speakers". That's just a huge no-no," he said.

Kelsey Hightower, a distinguished former Google software engineer, told Computing: "The conference organiser's own response to the situation didn't sit well with me." He wrote on X/Twitter that he understood how tough it could be, getting a conference together. But this was not an excuse.

Kevlin Henney, a member of the advisory board for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), said he had no support for Sizovs: "I withdrew my participation in the conference over the weekend as the facts of the situation became clear."

Software engineering influencer Scott Hanselman wrote on X/Twitter yesterday that he pulled out because he had been "duped" by the fake speakers and he only spoke at diverse conferences as a matter of principle. He posted lists of prominent female coders from which any conference organiser could gather speakers if they really wanted to.

Bob Martin wrote on X/Twitter: "This DevTernity affair smells a lot like Cancel Culture -- and it doesn't smell good to me."

Other superstar software developers who pulled out included Scott Wlaschin, Sven Peters and Ian Cooper. Computing contacted other speakers but none was prepared to speak in defence of DevTernity.

Sizovs wrote on X/Twitter that he had high standards and ethics and the accusations against him were unfair.

"DevTernity has been my life's work, the event has been highly regarded... It's all the result of hard and ethical work.

"Mr. Orosz didn't 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," he wrote.

Julia Kirsina did not respond to requests for comment.