Notes

Lego Embraces Modularity, Metaverse with its Software Engineering Culture

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By Scott Carey



The Managing Editor, News, InfoWorld



Lego the plastic brick manufacturer is expanding its software development teams rapidly to meet the increasing demand for virtual experiences.



Lego is rapidly expanding its software engineering teams as it diversifies from plastic bricks to bits and bytes, but can it be competitive with the top tech companies for the most talented engineers?



The Danish company is investing heavily to transform into a more technology-enabled business following the explosion of popularity of online brick-building games like Roblox and Microsoft's Minecraft.



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Realizing the opportunity that was missed, Lego announced a partnership with the videogame maker Epic in April of this year. The two companies will team up to create new experiences in the metaverse, blurring lines between digital and physical creating experiences.



"The partnership with Epic represents our journey into the metaverse, and there's an enormous product component to develop and an engineering component to support that," Atul Bhhardwaj (group chief of technology and digital at Lego Group) told InfoWorld.



Lego is looking to meet these opportunities head on and establish its own department of software engineering. It has a goal to double its digital team to 1,800 by 2023. The department will be located in offices in London, Shaghai, and Billund in Denmark.



Digital transformation powered by Lego



To drive this transformation Bhardwaj talks about making Lego more product-led, engineering-led and architecture-led.



He explained that he believes in as being project-led rather than product-led. This means that "the problems you tackle are defined as a set of digital products that you create and design."



Bhardwaj wants to make Lego Group more engineering-led. MINECRAFT ONLINE He wants to concentrate on the craft and architecture. "What engineering skill is required to create world-class, high-performance systems?" He asks.



Of course software engineers will play a major role but the new digital hires will be joined by designers, product managers, and technical program managers as the digital team expands.



The development of a cloud-native technology infrastructure



All of these ambitions must be supported by a solid digital architecture. Bhardwaj hopes Lego will develop systems that can be scaled and operate 24 hours a day and are open, flexible and easy to connect to, and are "scalable and available all the time", according to Bhardwaj.



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The company is building an all-data platform and refreshing its infrastructure to make it more flexible and cloud-native. Starting from very little cloud usage just 18 months ago, Lego hosts 54% of workloads in the cloud today, with plans to be 100% in the cloud public in the near future.



Bhardwaj said that "We are going for speed as well as flexibility, responsiveness and speed which is what the cloud gives us."



Lego Group employs a wide range of languages and frameworks including Unity for some of the new consumer-facing products and to React for Lego.com, and SAP ABAP for back-office systems. Bhardwaj said that "We've got nearly everything." "In the data platform, we are using Scala and Python. We are using the most recent technology today. If you are an engineer interested in a modern tech stack and you'll find it here."



Connecting to the Lego story



Lego and software go hand-in-hand. Many engineers love building physical models when they have spare time.



"Every person I interview has an Lego story," Bhardwaj said. "There is a connective tissue with the Lego brand."



Modular software components have for a long time been marketed for their Lego-like capabilities that allow them to "snap on" to other components. This idea extends to Lego's software building process which makes use of APIs and loosely coupled systems.



"When I talk about amazing architecture, it's similar to Lego bricks, in which we can construct something, then break it up and rebuild it easily. This is what we're trying to achieve here," Bhardwaj said.


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