Male Tech Conference Founder Is Behind Popular Woman Coding Influencer Account

Male Tech Conference Founder Is Behind Popular Woman Coding Influencer Account

The “most popular coding account on Instagram” features more than a thousand photos of a woman named Julia Kirsina who is “posting no-BS coding, career, productivity tips.” But a recent scandal related to the software developer conference Devternity has led many developers to point out that the account seems to be run by Devternity’s Eduards Sizovs, who is under fire for “auto-generating” a fake woman on a list of the conference’s speakers. 

Now IP logs from a forum for programmers obtained by 404 Media showed an account the forum administrator said belonged to Sizovs inviting and then logging into an account belonging to Coding Unicorn, Kirsina’s social media handle. A YouTube video posted last year by Sizovs that had five views when 404 Media accessed it showed Sizovs logged into his own email accounts as well as one for “Coding Unicorn.”

The news presents an unusual, and bizarre, wrinkle on an ongoing crisis where multiple high profile speakers have dropped out of Devternity over Sizovs’ use of at least one fake woman on the conference’s website.

Before 404 Media obtained the IP logs, software developers pointed out that many of @coding_unicorn’s posts are copied and pasted from Sizov’s LinkedIn posts without any attribution, and Sizov’s LinkedIn profile states, “I devote most of my time to … Growing the most popular coding account on Instagram with 120K followers: @coding_unicorn,” without elaborating on what exactly that entails. On Instagram, the captions are paired with images of her posing for the camera with a laptop, usually showing a screen where she’s supposedly in the middle of coding something.