I’m finding that building a little Lego late at night is a great way to maintain my sanity. Bear in mind however that this is the sanity of someone who chose to buy the Super Star Destroyer; I’m not sure there’s much left to maintain.
Some lessons:
Perfect isn’t important. When you’re ~2,000 pieces in and you realize something is off by one lego bit, the important thing is being able to backtrack and figure out the off-by-one mistake. Lesson: Debugging skill is more important than Developing skill.
When you’ve got 80 of some tiny 1×2 piece coming out of one bag set, it takes zen-like skills near the end to trust the 3 year old hasn’t lost one of them. The lesson here remains: Trust the Lego QA above all else. Perhaps a more generic lessons is “know the quality of your upstream QA”. In this case – global supervillain quality (ie: awesome and let down by the megalomaniac pointing the device in the wrong direction).
The SSD uses a huge amount of usually core architecture pieces as cosmetic features. Usually you know that this piece and that piece are going to be a hinge and you wait to discover how they’ll lock into place. With this set I have no clue. The rule of thumb seems to be that the more versatile the piece, the more likely it’s there for the cosmetic look of skyscrapershipness. Lesson: Sometimes your best practices are going to hold you back.
It’s big. I tend to work through the manual for a while building pieces and then go back to the main piece to add them. I try to minimize how often I have it sitting on the floor waiting for the next block to add on. Lesson: Don’t keep Lego on the floor? 
. It does make me wonder what it’d look like if built with agile methodologies.
“Lord Vader, we have the throne room built. See how it flies around very nicely and can go into production immediately. “
*force choke*
Lastly, the new Dengar sucks. He looks like he just finished swabbing the deck in Pirates of the Caribbean. Lesson: There’s always a bug
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Now to build a table size curve of the Death Star and video the SSD crashing into it.
