Trevor Manz
Trevor is a researcher and software engineer working on interactive computing tools in Python. He completed his PhD in the HIDIVE Lab at Harvard Medical School, where he developed interactive visualization and analysis tools for biological and AI applications. He created anywidget and contributes to open-source data tooling. Trevor now works at marimo, building a reactive notebook environment for Python. He lives in Brooklyn, NY with his two cats, Laird and Minnow, whom he’s very fond of.
Sessions
This tutorial is for anyone who works with data in Python notebooks. marimo is a reactive notebook that can serve as a personal data environment. Cells run in a deterministic order based on their dependencies, interactivity is built in, and notebooks are self-contained Python scripts you can share, version, and deploy. We start with a tour of marimo: its execution model, interactive elements, SQL, plotting, and sharing. From there, we get practical, composing off-the-shelf UI elements to build interactive tools for your data, then creating your own custom widgets with anywidget when you need something tailored to your workflow.
You're staring at a plot in a notebook. A subset of points doesn't look right. You want to select them, inspect them, understand why. In a traditional notebook, that means stopping to write more code and re-run cells. The exploration becomes an exercise in programming, not insight.
This talk comes in two parts. First, I introduce two primitives: reactive cell execution (marimo) and widgets (anywidget) that bridge Python and the browser. A brush stroke on a scatter plot becomes a Python selection. A slider flows through your analysis.
Second, I build intuition for composing these primitives—from quick explorations to reusable, domain-specific instruments that let you craft the interaction to match your scientific question.