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

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.