I'm the indie developer of a marketing tool/community (https://storyoriginapp.com/) for self-published authors like the ones mentioned in this article.

Not necessarily related to the article, but for other interested in the learning more about the self-publishing world.

Courses and training for authors on how to use Amazon ads, Facebook ads, build an email list, etc. has become incredibly easy to find. Some of the bigger names in the space are Mark Dawson, Nick Stephenson, Joanna Penn, Derek Murphy, and the 20BookTo50K community.

Authors are now essentially internet marketers who also happen to write books.

I know this is a bit cheeky, but HN sometimes has this comically simplistic view of other professions. It's as bad as the older C_Os who refer to all of dev and IT as "computer people." As someone who is both a developer and a marketer I can tell you both fields have depth and value, and neither is easy to do well.

Success often hinges on making something people want. Marketing done well is hugely helpful in determining both what people want and whether they perceive a product as a solution to their problems, and it can help guide product development with marketing analytics and other user data. I don't think I'd ever have been successful without a marketing background.

To take it back to the original point, I will never move to AMP. I spend a lot of time speeding up my pages through simplification, caching, and any other trick that makes sense (deferment, lazy loading, minification, combining, etc.) But there are a lot of reasons to not want your link to start with amp.google.com when someone shares my page.

* Any links to that URL rely on the good graces of the search engines to "count" for rankings and continue sending traffic. This is especially worrying if I decide to change standards. Will my rankings tank? Will the crawlers get totally confused and think I have a bunch of 404s? Both have been reported. These are not risks I'm willing to take with my sites that took so much work to build and promote.

* When someone shares my page I want my URL to be clear - not some google.com URL. That's both confusing for the user and bad for building a brand. Even if it was a cname to my own subdomain I'd feel better, e.g. amp.mysite.com

* Aside from the reason above, the lock-in is philosophically problematic. I intentionally use cross-platform apps on my phone because I don't want to be locked into an ecosystem. I don't foresee switching to Apple, but I didn't foresee switching to Android either. The point is that I could. This freedom is important to me.

* I don't trust that Google is committed to me and my content. Just look at the YouTubers getting screwed over by Google's lazy copyright policy. What makes you think they're going to suddenly staff up and/or care more on web content?

Anyway, as a writer, marketer, business owner, and web developer: fuck AMP.

Try looking at Stack Overflow questions in a particular subject area. If you can answer 80% you're probably on top of it. If you can answer <20% you're probably a long way from mastering that subject and need to practice more.

Many of those questions probe really odd behaviours you'll rarely see, so they're great training. 95% of what you do as a developer uses maybe 1-2% of your actual knowledge. It's the remaining 5%, those ugly bugs, those quirky edge cases, that really test you.

The more you can expose yourself to those outliers, the more quickly you can gauge your knowledge. It helps assess if you're really good at just going through the motions, or if you actually have a deep understanding.