wtf !?

that is such a weird thing to do :/

This story is absolutely batshit insane.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Orosz also claimed that the profile for Microsoft MVP and WhatsApp senior engineer Alina Prokhoda — a speaker set to appear at the JDKon 2024 conference for Java developers (run by Dev.events, the company also behind Devternity) — had no online presence outside of the event and was likely fake as well.

Sizovs claims that he first noticed the issue in October but elected to keep the unspecified fake persona live while searching for replacement speakers.

Sizovs claims two women speakers who were initially lined up to attend the Devternity conference — head of developer relations at Amazon Web Services, Kristine Howard, and “tech influencer” Julia Kirsina — dropped out of the event, leaving it with a “worse-than-expected level of diversity of speakers.” Which is certainly a rationale for keeping fake women on your speaker list to make your conference appear more diverse than it is, but not a very good one.

“If a man is dishonest to the point of trying to infiltrate women in tech communities and doing the shitty trope of ‘flash skin for extra reach/views’, they should be ejected from our industry entirely,” said Fong-Jones in her statement on Linkedin.

The RISEBA University of Applied Sciences — one of the schools that Kirsina claims to have attended between 2011 and 2014 on her LinkedIn Profile to obtain a bachelor’s degree in information technology — also told The Verge that its systems “do not indicate any records” of that qualification being transferred to a student with her name.

Several confirmed speakers have since withdrawn from both events, with Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson telling 404 Media that he was unsatisfied with the organizers.

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