Andrew Bethke

VideoAb

I make YouTube videos for fun, and part of making YouTube videos is choosing titles and thumbnails for those videos (it is if you want anyone to watch the videos, anyway). The thing is, you don't know what people will respond to; if you want to find a good title and thumbnail, you're probably going to have to try several. I created VideoAb to help with that; it uses the YouTube API to provide a simple way to AB test multiple combinations of thumbnails and titles.

Originally, I intended to actually release it for anyone to use. While I was working on it, though, YouTube built an AB testing tool directly into the platform . I decided that it no longer made sense to keep developing VideoAb, so I stopped working on it. Eventually, I touched up the code and decided to release it on Github. It's not the prettiest, it would have taken a lot of work to get the interface to a point where it could be released, but it does work.

NOTE: Google can change their APIs at any time. I have no way of verifying that anything will still work when you use it, in the future. I hope it will, but that's up to luck more than anything.

Glass for Markdown

Markdown, the simple text formatting system, is great. So, when I realized I should probably start working on making portfolio pieces to try to find a job after graduating from college, I figured I'd start with a Markdown project.

You see, I use this notetaking app called Obsidian, which is based on Markdown. If I'm someone who uses Obsidian and I just want to share my notes as a website, I could go through Obsidian and use their own "Publish" feature. Or, you could use Glass, which I developed as a simpler alternative. That's the whole point of Markdown; they're just text files, and you can do what you want with them.

Glass takes a pile of Markdown files and converts them, on the fly, into a navigable website. It's written in Python using Flask, and is available on Github.

Clearthink

On Clearthink, I make videos about things that interest me. In the past few years, that's been mostly history. There's also a video on there about my senior year of high school, because there was this big pandemic that upended everything and I had to make a video instead of giving an in-person presentation on what I'd been doing all year.

If you're interested, go ahead and click on the thumbnails at the top of the box to watch some of the videos, or take a look at the Youtube channel page.

Talking in the Theater

During school one day, me and my friend Morgan were talking about movies. At the time we were supposed to be, you know, doing schoolwork, so that was a problem. As a solution, we didn't stop talking about movies. Instead, we did a school project where we made a podcast that just so happened to be about movies. This is that podcast.

I have no idea if we're going to ever make more of these, but you can take a look at what we made in high school here if you want.

Crowd Crasher

I was getting some annoying ads for a mobile game for a while. It was one of those ads that are designed to be frustrating, the "player" making clearly terrible decisions in an attempt to get you to download the game since anyone with a brain could do better. Of course, the actual game is completely different. Or, well, I assume it is; I wasn't going to download that thing.

But what if someone made that game in the ad? I hadn't done any big programming projects in a while, so I decided to make something similar to it. And... I did. Is it a good game? Nope! The concept is horrible. But it's a game. You can play it on itch.io.

A Huge Fan

A Huge Fan is a game that was developed for a Game Jam themed around the popular webcomic XKCD. It was made in a team of four, with me as one of two programmers. It's basically one of those old flash games where you launch a thing, get money, upgrade the thing and repeat until satisfied. As a consequence of being developed in a couple days as part of a game jam, it's pretty buggy and less than perfectly designed, a fact that I take much of the responsibility for. Despite its flaws, it's available on itch.io.

Expansive Horizons

A long time ago, I wanted to start doing game development. As my first game, I figured that a simple space shooter would be, well, simple. So, I made one of those. Is it the best game ever? No, obviously not. Is it the worst game ever? I don't think so. It's available on itch.io.