High School Student Wins Hackathon With A Tool That Blocks TV Spoilers

I DON'T WANT TO KNOW WHO HAD TO PACK THEIR KNIVES AND GO

Twivo is a simple idea: protect yourself from spoilers by censoring references to a given TV show until you can get home and catch up. It’s a nice little tool with a great backstory: it was created in only 10 hours by a high school student, who was the only female entrant to finish her project in a local hackathon.

Jennie Lamere, a 17-year-old high school student in Nashua, New Hampshire, was the only female entrant to deliver a completed project at the TVnext Hackathon in Boston last month. (There were four other women who entered but did not finish.) She also won not only her category but the event’s equivalent of Best in Show, besting contributions from professional coders at ESPN and Klout.

Twivo is simple; only a few hundred lines of code, it’s an extension for the Chrome browser that’s a sort of search-and-censor tool for Twitter viewed in the browser. Want to avoid knowing who went home on last night’s Top Chef? Enter “Top Chef” and it’ll block out any references to it until you can get home.

Mother Jones takes a look at it from a gender perspective; female entrants are rare in hackathons and in the coding community at large. Lamere, for her part, seems unfazed, noting that “it’s something that I’m used to at these things.”

Her extension isn’t publicly available yet, but a company called Furious Minds says it intends to help her polish and release Twivo in the coming weeks.

 

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Dan Nosowitz is a freelance writer and editor who has written for Popular Science, The Awl, Gizmodo, Fast Company, BuzzFeed, and elsewhere. He holds an undergraduate degree from McGill University and currently lives in Brooklyn, because he has a beard and glasses and that's the law. You can follow him on Twitter.