This teen girl will save you from spoilers: Jennie Lamere hacks television
17-year-old Jennie Lamere wins hackathon with spoiler-alert plugin.
Spoiler alert
17-year-old Jennie Lamere has won TVNext Hack 2013's Best in Show prize for developing a browser plugin called Twivo, which saves television viewers from Twitter-borne spoilers.
Fandom is awesome, but the result of an enthusiastic post-episode discussion is the looming risk of spoilers for those who had real-life stuff to do and had to let this week's episode wait until later. You can see Jennie Lamere's presentation in the video player above; it starts at 3:23.
Lamere beat professional developers to win the grand prize, and apparently only needed 150 lines of code to do so. More on what Twivo does below. Not only was Jennie Lamere the only under-18 in the competition, she was also the only girl.
At least one of Jennie Lamere's new best friends is a "Game of Thrones" fan. The demand is clearly there.
An NPR interview is all well and good, but Lamere was blessed with accolades beyond the event itself... a blessing from high atop Geek Olympus:
What. Wil Wheaton just posted on tumblr about me..... What.
— Jen Lamere (@jenniee_l) May 9, 2013
Twivo won "Best use of sync-to-broadcast" before taking the top prize. The plugin solves the second-screen problem, wherein you're watching a prerecorded show and your Twitter feed ruins the ending. Here's how it works:
Simply enter the name of the show, and Twivo (short for “Twitter for TiVo”) will block all mentions of it from your Twitter feed, while also syncing your Twitter feed so that tweets show up when they would have during the show’s original airing.
Developer Paul Lamere, Jennie's father, has kept track of how his daughter's story is spreading. Jennie is now being courted with internships and partnership deals. It's a good day for women in technology.