Lego, but as a puzzle?

Forget Master Builders, are you a 10x Lego Builder?

I’m a kid from the 80’s, grew up living Lego, dreaming Lego, praying to Santa for it in my gifts under the tree.

Needless to say, I’m considered by my kiddos as the household’s “Master Builder”.

But I know, I’m not that different. I’m just like all the kids of my generation who caught the Lego bug. And when it came time to grow up, instead of “design job” or engineering, I opted for the adult Lego equivalent… software.

Not because software is easy but because it’s a fun puzzle. The ultimate puzzle?

You see once you graduate from being a Lego instruction book jockey (let’s be generous though, we were all there once, right of passage and all) we rapidly moved on to the bottomless box of all the sets. Expensive collections we’d fallen asleep dreaming about, that our parents or grandparents debated buying, only to callously be demolished either for the fun or the opportunity the pieces make possible.

And after countless creative endeavors, often in search of parental adoration, but mostly just “because”, we seamlessly, unknowingly, graduated to a finger-feeling. That ability to reach into the box and touch a piece and just know what it is, and to intuitively know whether it will solve the problem at hand.

So for many of us, the allure of software was a chance to do it again, to develop a similar, yet tangibly valuable sixth sense. A feeling that you’re on the right track. A reason to invest the time to pick it up and try it, not to see if it just fits, but to see if it “works” as a piece of the solution. GitHub, StackOverlow, HackerNews, and countless snippets and repos from our past, and our peers … our bottomless boxes.

Yet after marrying, and being astonished that not everyone of our generation has that same feeling about Lego. I was still lucky enough to be shown the beauty of traditional puzzles by my wife. The joy of finding that piece amongst a thousand others. Of using heuristics like working from the outside edges inwards. To the “flow” state you feel when listening to a book, music, or just chatting while “puzzling”.

Then it struck me, why not Lego? In hindsight, I went to software to get my fix, the next problem solving high. But in reality, despite the movies you are NOT a master builder when you can reach in the box and make whatever your dreams imagine… you ARE a master builder when you can look at a picture on the box and build the EXACT same Lego set without the instructions.

So software should be as intuitive as Lego, we all dream, but the most rewarding software projects are the puzzles you with that satisfying click to all the bits just fitting. So maybe we have it backwards, or not, maybe it’s recursive.

Maybe the ultimate is that a Lego box set is just a puzzle, a puzzle once solved is a credit towards your Master Builder test.

Open the box, intuit the internals of the result from a picture or two. Just like “knowing” how to build the latest tool on HN just by reading the launch post. Yet it doesn’t mean you could have done it first, but you can say you know how to follow along fast with a visual in hand.

But getting back to Lego. Unsurprisingly, our generation had the StarTrek TNG influence too. So forgive the trope, Lego without the instructions is to a “puzzle”, as Chess is to 3D Chess in TNG. It’s close, but orders of magnitude more challenging.

The goal, as with all puzzles, is to open the manual after it’s “done” and as your turn the pages, check each off as you would a 2D puzzle. If you get to the end and each step matches what you built then I think you can claim victory.

What’s better though?

Well, it’s obvious right? You achieve the same result but with fewer pieces AND hopefully in less time. And if lucky, it looks identical but it’s better engineered. It omitted the steps included in the manual, visually jarring pieces intended to make construction more obvious to kids, but mostly useless aesthetically and structurally.

In a nutshell, if we were lucky to make it past the endless box, to develop that finger feeling, we had a chance of becoming a Lego 10x-er.

We could watch any Lego documentary and think “I can do that” when they show the obligatory building challenge, the Google-level job test for Lego product “engineers”.

That same ability to see a software solution, or the makings of it. To “reach inside the (internet) box” and find the right pieces, using a finger feeling to jump past the wasted time others endure. And then reveling in delivering, not just the desired solution, but one that functions identically but is better engineered. With many useless pieces left at the end, a badge of honor yes, but a shortcut others can’t take.

So here is to Lego Puzzlers everywhere, many of whom are 10x software engineers, lets embrace what Lego gave our young-selves.

Let’s make sure the world knows Lego sets CAN be competed like a puzzle. Throw the instructions in a box until the end. And know that if you succeed you’re a 10x Lego Builder.

Needless to say, I’m staring at the Bonsai Tree set right now with only the box picture as my guide. Zen in so many ways.