While most 17-year-old girls I know are worrying about their upcoming prom and who just broke up with whom, Jennie Lamere is spending her time doing something just a tad different—designing code. Yes you heard me correctly, I said code. In fact, the New Hampshire -raised teen recently walked away with the grand prize in national coding competition due to her solution.

Called Twivo, the program helps prevent Twitter users from viewing comments that might contain spoilers for their favorite shows before they get the chance to watch it firsthand. I’m sure you have been in this frustrating situation before – because I know I have – you don’t have time to watch the season finale of your favorite drama right away, an episode that you have been counting down the days for, only to see a comment on Twitter revealing an event from the episode before you’ve seen it. Well, Twitter users never have to suffer through this scenario again, all thanks to Lamere.

Currently a student at an all-girls school the Academy of Notre Dame in Massachusetts, she is particularly fond of entering “hackathon” contests that enable programmers, developers and designers to join together and compete against one another in order to create code in a short period of time. Her day of winning officially came on April 27 in Boston at the Tvnext Hack event, where her and about 80 other individuals did their best to be crowned the winner. It is interesting to note here that out of every single person involved in this event, Lamere was the only female who presented a completed project.

Winning in two categories, including best use of sync-to-broadcast and best in show, the teen walked away with an iPad mini and an Apple TV. She even ranked higher than those who have deep roots in the coding space, with entrants from major companies like ESPN duking it out with her to the bitter end.

You see for yourself in the image below how Lamere’s solution works. Basically, a user will enter keywords for a show they want to avoid hearing about and can decide how long of a period the block will remain and magically the Tweets “fly” into oblivion.


Image via Mother Jones

While still being tested to ensure it works the way in which it was intended, technology company Furious Minds has already acknowledged that it wants to team with the adolescent coder to bring the product to the market.  And who knows, maybe every social networking website could one day implement this solution?

According to Ashley Swartz, CEO and founder of Furious Minds, "We're always interested in the convergence between TV and social media, and Jen's hack was awesome, not to mention she did the entire thing herself."

Looking forward to her freshmen year at Rochester Institute of Technology in the upcoming fall semester, Lamere will be majoring in software engineering and has dreams of becoming a Google employee. Her win at the hackathon conference just may be that little something on her resume that enables her to enter the search engine doors, you never know.