
Mirna Mahfoud
Biography
Software developer, technical coach, world traveler, poetry and art lover, Jane Austen fan, tea fanatic.
NewCrafts Paris 2025
Developer under attack! Get from conflict to conversation with Verbal Aikido
HandsOn
This is a hands-on lab with limited capacity.
Verbal aggression is an unfortunate reality in the workplace, with instances like pushy salespeople, blame in code reviews, and passive-aggressive co-workers being all too common. As software developers, gracefully dealing with such attacks becomes crucial for our professional growth and well-being. That's where Verbal Aikido comes in.
Join us to discover the power of Verbal Aikido in transforming conflict into constructive conversations. In this interactive session, you will learn practical dialogue techniques and strategies tailored specifically for software developers. By practicing Verbal Aikido, you'll develop the skills to navigate challenging situations. On top of that, you will get:
- Actionable Skills: The more you practice Verbal Aikido, the better equipped you become at defusing conflicts and steering conversations toward positive outcomes.
- Workplace Application: Verbal Aikido provides practical tools to effectively deal with challenging situations at work, allowing you to maintain professionalism and foster healthier working relationships.
- Improved Personal Relationships: Applying Verbal Aikido principles extends beyond the workplace, leading to more harmonious interactions with your family and friends.
- Self-Discovery: Learning Verbal Aikido will not only enhance your communication abilities, but it will also provide valuable insights into your own patterns and behaviors, facilitating personal growth and self-awareness.
- Live demos and practice: we will role-play the audience's real-life cases!
Join us for this transformative talk and discover how Verbal Aikido can empower you to handle verbal attacks with confidence, grace, and resilience.
Previous events
NewCrafts Paris 2024
Get time to do great work with the Quality View workshop
Hands-on
What if I told you that the key to get time for technical excellence lies not in business cases and high-tech analysis tools, but in harnessing the ancestral human skills of visualizing, storytelling, and empathizing?
One of the biggest challenges developers face is the lack of time for refactoring, clean code, clean architecture, and testing. The quality view workshop involves the entire team and stakeholders. By collaborating on sketching an accessible visualization of what lies "under the hood", this workshop will make non-developers empathize with your concerns for quality work. As a result, you will get time to do work you can be proud of!
During this session, you will:
- Discover what Quality Views are
- Draw a quality view on a provided codebase
- Have fun by playing the different roles in the team
- Learn a step-by-step workshop to build a quality view on your own code base
- Learn how to tune your quality view to your specific business risks and challenges (deployability, availability, onboarding, bus factor...)
- Learn when and how to get the product or business stakeholders involved to maximize their interest and engagement
- Discover how to prioritize technical excellence where it matters: on the upcoming business needs!
- Look at follow-up activities that use the quality view to define tasks for refactoring, risk management, or knowledge sharing.
- As a bonus, this workshop builds empathy and team bonds within a team. It's a great way to break silos.
Prepare for an interactive session where you will learn by doing. Attend my session and embark on the path to technical excellence today!