Jennie Lamere on her passion for hackathons

Jennie Lamere is one of 10 nominees for Emerging Talent of the Year in the 2014 net Awards. She only started coding about 12 months ago, but nevertheless won the grand prize at the TVNext Hack event last year for her app that hides TV spoilers from your Twitter feed. A media storm ensued, and since then she's landed two internships at Twitter. We quizzed her to find out more.

Tell us about your main areas of competency.

I work a lot more on the coding side of things. I've worked in JavaScript, CoffeeScript, HTML, HAMLC, CSS and SASS. I have done a little bit of design work, but I tend to be more of a client-side programmer.

Are you currently working or studying?

I am studying Software Engineering at the Rochester Institute of Technology. I am planning on focusing on Human Computer Interaction as an application domain. I interned at Crashlytics at Twitter last summer, and am returning this summer. I am also currently working for a professor in my department, working in JavaScript.

Give us a summary of your web work so far.

The first web work I did was a Chrome application called Twivo. It was a pretty short project which hides spoilers from Twitter, and saves them to be 'replayed' later. Twivo is short for 'TiVo for Twitter'.

I did front-end work for Crashlytics at Twitter this past summer, working in HAMLC and CoffeeScript, and working with Backbone and Marrionette. Since then, I decided to take a client-side programming class at RIT, to fill in any gaps in knowledge I may have. In that class, we have done a lot of work with JavaScript and jQuery. I have done a few other projects on the side, but they have been more 'hacky', as I haven't found a lot of time to commit to a project. My favorite quick hack is called 'How Long Since Bieber Did Something Stupid', and it tracks how long its been since an article was published about Justin Bieber.

At what age did you start learning to code, and how did your interest in the web get started?

I started to code about a year ago, when I took a computer science course in school, and began attending hackathons alongside my dad. I got more interested in the web over the summer, when my work at Twitter led me to do more client-side work.

What was the first thing you built?

The first thing I built was Cinemusic, with my friend Barbara Duckworth. The app recommends movies based on their soundtracks and the user's musical tastes.

What are you working on now?

I'm not working on any projects in particular, but I am learning a lot in school. Currently, I am doing a lot of work with Ruby on Rails, JavaScript and jQuery.

Are there any people whose work has been especially inspirational to you?

My dad has been a big inspiration, as he is the one who showed me all of the cool things you can build, and got me excited about computing.