For years, building interactive widgets in Python notebooks meant wrestling with toolchains, platform quirks, and a mountain of JavaScript machinery. Most developers took one look and backed away slowly. Trevor Manz decided that barrier did not need to exist. His idea was simple: give Python users just enough JavaScript to unlock the web’s interactivity, without dragging along the rest of the web ecosystem. That idea became anywidget, and it is quickly becoming the quiet connective tissue of modern interactive computing. Today we dig into how it works, why it has taken off, and how it might change the way we explore data.