Last Friday CrowdStrike did something really bad and it destroyed every airport in the world. I didn't bother to learn anything else about it because I was too busy writing my 10k whitepaper about how all the problems were all caused by one simple mistake: not drinking my patented Miracle Tonic™®.

Developers who drink my Miracle Tonic write code 100% faster with 100% fewer bugs. This would have prevented the CrowdStrike outage, the 2016 DNC hack, Ariane 5, Therac-25, and that one moth caught in the Harvard Mark II. Developers are also happier at work, suffer no burnout, and keep all standups to exactly five minutes.

The Miracle Tonic is so effective that it should be immoral not to drink it. It's like if surgeons didn't wash their hands. If you write code for a living and you don't drink my Miracle Tonic, do us all a favor and never touch a computer again. You idiot. You absolute moron. I can't believe you call yourself a "professional".

Frequently Asked Questions:

Do you have any actual evidence that Miracle Tonic actually helps programmers?

Yes I do! All sorts of studies prove the effectiveness of Miracle Tonic:

1. One survey found that 68% of devs drinking miracle tonic say their code is "awesome". That means it works!
2. A double-blind clinical trial found that 7 undergraduates who were given Miracle Tonic wrote 10% better code (using the Hills-Bourne-Davidio Corrected Dolorimetry metric) than the control group (6 undergraduates who were punched in the face).
3. Someone found twelve projects on GitHub that didn't use Miracle Tonic and they had 268% worse failure rates than this one project I did with it. That's a P value of 0.00004!

That's so many studies! I can say with 100% confidence that Miracle Tonic is proven to work beyond a shadow of a doubt.

I read a study saying that Miracle Tonic gives people headaches.

Why are you trusting studies? Are you really gonna listen to some graduate student dweeb who's never been a real programmer?! If you're curious about Miracle Tonic, just try it and see for yourself.

Are there any downsides to drinking Miracle Tonic?

Of course, there is no silver bullet, everything is tradeoffs, etc etc etc. The downside of Miracle Tonic is it doesn't work if your company is a toxic feature factory that cares more about micromanaging mindless worker drones than cultivating good engineers. And don't drink it if you're allergic to peanuts.

This tastes revolting.

I've trained five Miracle Tonic Brand Ambassadors and they all tell me it's delicious. Your taste buds must be wrong.

I tried drinking your Miracle Tonic and it didn't make me a better programmer.

How dare you. How dare you spread FUD about the most important programming technology ever made. Were you drinking exactly 12.063 mL at 67° C every 75 minutes? Yeah, thought not. Of course it's not going to work if you didn't follow it properly. And you'd know this if you took my $1500 three-day "how do drink Miracle Tonic" course. Which you didn't. Get out of my sight.

How does Miracle Tonic compare to competing products, like toad oil, Pirelli's Miracle Elixir, or Design-by-Contract?

Fucking charlatans, all of them.

This is the part of my job I dread.

I do formal methods for a living. Last year 100% of my income came from either writing specifications or training others how to write specifications. This year, due to a lot of work in diversifying my revenue streams, it will only be 90% of my income. This creates an immense pressure to become an ambulance chaser, to see ten billion dollars in economic damage as a chance to say "look at me!", a longshot chance to find the next source who'll pay my next month's rent.

I'm also a True Believer. Of course formal methods would have prevented the CrowdStrike outage! It also would have prevented COVID-19, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Lincoln assassination. Years of being an advocate have shaped my worldview to always see how it could have helped, how everything is just the right shape nail for the hammer I'm selling you.

None of this depends on anything particular to formal methods, which is why advocates of every stripe are telling us "what they should have done", because every advocate is a true believer, and every advocate wants to get paid. I understand this all, and I get why people do this, but I hate feeling this way, that all this misery begets opportunity. I hate the pressure to say "they needed X" as fast as possible, before people lose interest, regardless of whether X would help or even if they were already using X. I hate the feeling that capitalizing on this might compromise my principles.

Most of all though, I fear the slippery slope from advocating to grifting. There are people out there who saw the outage and got excited. Please, God, let me never be that.