As a kid I watched How It’s Made on Discovery like it was a religion. Calm narrator, a conveyor belt, and somewhere in the middle crayons, or guitars, or industrial-sized pretzels, appearing out of nowhere. Later came Mike Rowe’s Dirty Jobs, which scratched the same itch from the other end: how does the world actually work, usually from inside something nobody wants to be inside of.
I never grew out of it. I still want to know how things work from the inside. It is probably why I ended up in Power Platform, where I spend my days opening things up to see what is in them. It is also why I could not stop looking at a tool called anatomy.
What anatomy is
Anatomy is a skill for drawing figures, and I found it at skills.wheresryan.sh/anatomy. The rule is simple and slightly unhinged: do not draw boxes and arrows. Invent a real physical object whose working is the idea, and build it from many small, precise parts. Screws, seams, keycaps, a cable with a connector on both ends. The object is the explanation. It is How It’s Made without the narrator.
The figure on my homepage
I needed to explain why Power Platform gets an app out faster than traditional code. Normally that is a diagram with three boxes and an arrow that nobody remembers. Instead I used anatomy, through an AI coding assistant, and we built an actual desk computer. Its screen walks through building an app: you sign in, open Power Apps, connect SharePoint, connect a database, build a flow in Power Automate, and the screen finally says that the app is ready.
It did not arrive in one go. The first idea was a lathe versus a pegboard, which made sense for about ten minutes. Then two computers. At one point the screen was a glass dome that looked exactly like an eyeball, staring back at you. Buttons overlapped. The desk was lopsided, and I sent a screenshot with red arrows to prove it. The keyboard, for the record, was never touched again after I said so.
Why I liked it
It is one SVG file. No JavaScript, with the animation done in CSS, so it fits the rules of this site. It also forces a certain honesty: every part has to sit on another part, and every line has to end on something. You cannot hand-wave a diagram when someone can zoom in and find a screw floating in mid-air.
I think that is the same reason I like building apps that way, and the same reason I liked those shows. The interesting part is never the finished product. It is the moment you see what is inside.
The computer on my homepage now has more detail than some production systems I have seen have documentation. The cat remains unemployed.