There Are No Girls on the Internet - Tech Conference Used AI to Fake Female Speakers to Look Diverse – BEST OF TANGOTI

Episode Date: January 30, 2026

The tech conference Devternity was canceled (not fake canceled, literally canceled) after allegations that the founder has been inventing fake women and catfishing on Instagram for years. Bridget does a deep dive to get to the bottom of it, and what it says about default, dismissive attitudes about marginalized people in tech. There were real women the whole time! Why not invite one of them?! A Tech Conference Listed Fake Speakers for Years: I Accidentally Noticed: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/devternity-fake-speakers/ Male Tech Conference Founder Is Behind Popular Woman Coding Influencer Account: https://www.404media.co/coding-unicorn-instagram-julia-kirsina-devternity/ Tech Conference Collapses After Organizer Admits to Making Fake ‘Auto-Generated’ Female Speaker: https://www.404media.co/devternity-fake-speakers-eduard-sizovs/ Eduards Sizovs’s full response thread: https://twitter.com/eduardsi/status/1728422017417032140 Here’s a collection of Julia through the years: https://docs.google.com/document/d/10Fds4DgzU_Yem577sfGykauuNkltIq3ykZdZUd1EAUE/edit?usp=sharingSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. I love 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 2006, 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 heated. So today, let's revisit the story of DevTurity and

why fake personas are the tech problem that nobody's taking seriously enough. 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 is a production of IHeart Radio 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 scam, but 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. Yeah, your love of scams and catfishing is legendary, no doubt. 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 in 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 to? So let's talk about DevTurity. So DevTurnity 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 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 Gergly 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 speakers page listed as a staff engineer at Coinbase, and Natalie slash Natalia, sometimes it's Natalie, sometimes it's Italia, 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 Gerkely 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. Gergaly 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. Nata. 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 on to it like a dog with a bone. Because dude did his homework. He found web archives that go back to three. 2021 that lists these two non-existent women as speakers at Depturnity. One of them also spoke,

or at least was listed as a speaker, back in 2022 as well. In the aftermath of all this, Gergley really did some deep digging. He found a tweet from 2021, publicly calling out the conference for having a mostly male lineup. On August 3rd, 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 DevTurity 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 Kraschina, 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. Julie replies to Maddie's tweet saying, hi Matt, Julia from the

DevTurity team here. Thanks for raising this. Out of the four. 14 invited female speakers, three confirmed, two canceled, as we had to postpone to survive COVID. There was 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 Devternity for having an all-male lineup, August 3rd, 2021, is when Devternity also, coincidentally, adds their very first fake woman speaker. Like I said, Gergley brought receipts.

The Devternity 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 Slatter, 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. If you're going to make up fake people, why have all the changes to your website be publicly on GitHub? Gergley 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, Gurgly 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. Gergley 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 shoutouts to Gergley here. We will throw the piece on his website with all of his receipts and the show notes for folks to check out. You definitely should. But one of the questions that Gergley 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. He doesn't think he was the only person to be like looking at 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, 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 Gergley 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? 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. Yeah. I mean, I would like to think that if I encountered this, I would have said something. Would you have dug like gurgly? I would have dug for sure.

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 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 Gurgly is the kind of person who was like, I'm taking this to social media right away because something is not right. Yeah, I appreciate that too. Goodos to Gurgly. Let's take a quick break. Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends, me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Bodenkirk to David Letterman, help make you funnier.

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Edward back. So Gargley 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 DevTurity Conference founder, Edward Sizoff, first tweets in a lot of. first tweets in response. So his response is probably one of the most dramatic, but also nonsensical 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 Gurgly must be the bad guy. Why?

Because Gurgly took to so. media to talk about this in the first place, rather than, I guess, like, contacting him directly, privately, which means that Gergley 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. Orszal'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 Gergley who is the bad guy because Gergley decided to like 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 Gergley being the bad guy and being out to get Edwards. Edwards also uses some pretty choice language defending himself. He writes, Alex Blaine 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 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 were advertising publicly could not possibly come to fruition. Like, what if I'm really interested in whatever this fake person, Natalie, has to say and her line, 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 advertise 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. Yeah, the deceitfulness here is definitely the worst part. 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 criteria. 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 a 404 media 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 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. It sounds like he's saying that Julia had to drop out because she was going to be on the organizing committee. And I've never heard of that being a rule 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. 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. And the fix was changing some copy on the website, which historically in most systems is a pretty quick fix. It would take weeks. So lastly, from Edwards' long Twitter explanation, you know who is really at thought here? Can you guess?

Society. 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 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 up to $800 to attend this conference where they fake, lineup, it also really sucks for the other speakers. Scott Hanselman, who was 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've my rules for participation posted on my site, including an inclusive lineup for years. I was dup 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 Heinemir Hansen, the creator of Rubion 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. 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 I had nothing to do with this And I'm embarrassed for Edwards You know like this would be mortifying to me From what I've seen poking around it Like the Debturnity website And Julia's coding unicorn Instagram account It seems like they're

Edwards is really into Devternity. I mean, obviously it's his whole it 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 is really just aesthetics and social aspects of being a coder, a 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. So I want to get into that more in just a bit because I have picked up on what you're saying too. and I think it goes quite a bit deeper than that. But specifically about the Devternity 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, Devternity, this is a conference. People attend. There are lanyards. 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. Yeah, and maybe we can talk about the name, DevTurity. What does that mean? One might say it doesn't mean anything. One might even go further and say, maybe it's a little bit fake.

Yeah. But it is a real name. it seems to be a blend of the words Deb 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. 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 Deb Trinity in 2021, 2021, 2022, and 2023. She was the person who was supposed to speak, but then moved up to the person. be an organizer so she couldn't speak. You 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 adapt trinity fan. She's done your basic, like, influencer stuff.

She does giveaways, raffles 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 haughty while really hyping up DevTurity events and conferences. But, and here is the big reveal, she's not even really really. that doesn't look like. 404 media looked into it. They found IP logs that seemed 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 accounts

as well as one for coding unicorn. Many of Coding Unicorn's post 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 coding unicorn here. Do you want to become an awesome software developer, build a successful career,

become more productive and happy I'm here to have. 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. Yeah, it sounds like something from the 90s movie hackers.

Which, by the way, I was looking at a picture of the fashions from that movie, Matthew Lillard in the movie Hacker's, 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 suspect. sex. Men suffer from biases equal to women. Think of job interviews. We give too much attention

to gender bias and depreciate 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. It is not even interested in talking about it. Certainly it would not say that she is based it herself. And it's only interested in improving herself.

Like, that just reads like a woman invented by a man. More after a quick break. Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guide, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest,

SNL's Mikey Day and headwriter, Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. The worst singer in the group? The worst? Yeah. Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation.

The group. The yard birds, right? That's the name. The Harvard yard, but they're open to change. Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. Since you guys are middle aged. One erection.

Listen to humor me with Robert Smygel and Friends on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Humor me. I need some jokes to make me seem funny. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ads supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio.

Think podcasting can help your business. Think IHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Call 844-844-I-Hart to get started. That's 844-8-4-8-4-I-Hart. Last night, a blown call changed a game. This morning, the internet lost its mind. Highlights are trending, opinions are flying,

and nobody's telling you exactly what happened. That's where Sports Slice comes in. I'm Timbo. Every episode, we're cutting through the noise. Breaking down the plays, the controversies, and the stories behind the headlines. We go straight to the source, the athlete themselves, their locker room stories, their reactions, the stuff nobody gets to hear. The laughs, the drama, the triumphs, the moments that never make the highlight real.

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Others say it's unleashing human potential. Either way, the podcast's superhuman documented it all, embedded in the games and with the athletes for a full year. Within probably 10 days, I'd put on 10 pounds. I was having trouble stopping the muscle growth. Listen to Superhuman on the I-Hard radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's get right back into it. So the evidence that links Edwards to being Julia,

like catfishing-ass Julia, or at least that indicates that she's not a real human, is pretty overwhelming. Some of the images that she has posted on Instagram that show computer monitors have her logged in under Edwards' name? On Lobsters, a coding social media forum, Edwards and Julia's accounts were banned multiple times for sock puppeting in 2019 and 2020. The person who runs Lobster said, I remember being creeped out by the effort involved and choice to use Instagram glamour shots. It was just the one profile when I saw him, and I'm kind of stunned that he's not just continued

but multiplied his efforts. Again, many of Julia's Instagram posts were copied word for word from Edwards' own social media accounts. And The Verge looked into the university where Julia claims to have attended for her bachelor's degree in information technology on her LinkedIn. And the university said that they do not indicate any records of a student with her name. I'm also, like, 99% sure that it is not even the same woman in every picture. It's like just a hot woman with dark hair and ample cleavage in every picture. But I genuinely, like, I went back to the very first post back in 2018.

And I genuinely think they are different people. The woman who is used back in 2018 when the account first starts looks very different from the woman that is used today. They both have brown hair and ample bosom, but that is pretty much where the similarities end. We'll put a link to a couple of pictures of Julia from her Instagram in the show notes. And honestly, you can be the judge. Let me know if you think this is legit. These are all the same women. Or if you think something is going on.

And this is kind of complicated. I want to make sure that I am speaking about this carefully. But we need to talk about the way that Julia presents physically on Instagram. Like, it's clear that he is going for a specific kind of look with the way that Julia looks on social media. Like, she's very conventionally attractive. In all of her pictures, she's posed to look like, I saw somebody describe it as almost like a booth babe kind of way, where the cleavage is very prominent. The poses are all kind of like,

Like, I wouldn't call them sexualized, but they're definitely meant to highlight her physicality and her looks and her figure. And it's this very specific kind of, almost like an uncanny valley kind of hot, where she is in these very clearly posed, staged pictures that look kind of fake that could not possibly be depicting a real scenario where she's like really working. Like this might sound minor, but one of the things about her is that she talks quite a bit about how being a developer means that she can travel the world, doesn't have a boss, she can work from whatever exotic locale that she wants. So in one picture, she's meant to be working from like someplace, like an exotic beach of some kind. And she's holding one of those big giant coconuts where they just chop the top off and put a straw in it and then you're drinking it. Not the small ones, the big ones. So if you've ever had one of those, you know that they're like, they're coconuts. And so the bottom is rounded.

It's not flat. You couldn't put it on a table like you would a normal beverage container that has a flat bottom. It's rounded. It's a coconut. So she's holding it in one hand and working on her laptop with another. In what world would somebody whose computer is the main thing they work on, be holding a tippy beverage that you cannot sit down while also working one-handed on their computer. their laptop. I don't buy it. Never happening. Best case scenario, it's a risky move. 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 talks about her favorite podcasts. Can you guess who she lists as one of her favorite podcasts? Is it us?

Can we make a list? You know, we got a tech podcast here. No, it's Joe Rogan, of course. Famous tech podcaster Joe Rogan. She also likes Tim Ferriss. also noted developer. And she does this thing where she photoshopps herself into pictures with famous tech leaders. Like she's 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. 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. Yeah, you really called it. You were like, I've seen this picture before.

And you found that 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 catfish calls Nev Schulman, 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's not a feminist. She has a fountain.

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 other men in your images. You can't have anything 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 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 is 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 peop how she twist 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 New, 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, etc. 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 Julie. as well. Whoa. This goes deep. 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 DevTurnity, 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 a general influencer on tech, but also life. Like that's what I think that he wanted to be. 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 like Game of Thrones characters. But around 2018, his pictures sort of changed. They become a lot more polished and a lot more influensary, for lack of the 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 seen success or growth.

And then sometime in 2018, he creates Julius 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 lot. laptop vaguely in the background or whatever. But I also want to say that, like, not only is it incredibly insulting to women, and it's 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 it's just projecting their desires back at them, they will be invested and also believe that person actually exists. So that's a lot of effort. What do you think is getting out of all of this? 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 DevTurity in her bio next to a little heart. She often wears like DevTriety 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 hipes 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 be 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 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, i.e., 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 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. 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?

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. They 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? site to GitHub for some ridiculous reason. 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, we'll figure that out.

But no, I think it's got to be the latter. 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, 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 got to be, I think the Griff 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 with 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 and 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 network of marginalized people. And honestly, it's like other conferences managed 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 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 are so many women and trans folks and non-binary folks and queer folks and black folks and people of color in the space. 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 mask. 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 sideline 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 marginalized, 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 that this is how they see us. It really does. 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.

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 it serves us. When that is seen as a currency,

I don't think it serves us. So I wanted to end 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 weird explanations from November 25th. The Defturity Conference is canceled. As for Julia, well, on November 17th, she hinted that maybe she's reexamining her priorities and might be spending less time on 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 us at hello at tangoati.com. You can also find transcripts for today's episode

at tangoity.com. 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 IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Another podcast from some SNL, late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier.

This week, my guest, S&L's Mikey Day and headwriter, Streeter Seidel, help an acapella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and friends on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Last night, a blown call changed a game.

This morning, the internet lost its mind, and nobody's telling you exactly what happened. That's where Sports Slice comes in. I'm Timbo. In every episode, we're cutting through the noise, breaking down the biggest moments in sports and giving you the real story behind the headline. And we're going straight to the source,

the athletes themselves, their locker room stories, their reactions in the moment, and the stuff nobody gets to hear. Listen to Sports Slice on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. And for more, follow Timbo Slicalif 12 in the TikTok podcast network on TikTok.

Life is full of hurdles. So how do you keep going? On Hurtle with Emily Abadi, we're talking with the most inspiring women in sports and wellness, from professional athletes, coaches, and Olympic champions about the challenges that shape them and the mindset that keeps them moving forward. At our level, at this scale, being able to fail in front of the entire world. Like, I can do anything.

I can do anything. Listen to Hurtle with Emily Abadi on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. Imagine an Olympics where doping is not only leading. but encouraged. It's the enhanced games. Some call it grotesque.

Others say it's unleashing human potential. Either way, the podcast's Superhuman documented it all, embedded in the games and with the athletes for a full year. Within probably 10 days, I'd put on 10 pounds. I was having trouble stopping the muscle growth. Listen to Superhuman on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHart podcast.

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