Notes

Lego Embraces Modularity and Metaverse in Its Software Engineering Culture

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By Scott Carey



Director of Editorial, News, InfoWorld



Lego, the maker of plastic bricks, is expanding its software development teams quickly to meet growing demand for virtual experiences.



Lego is rapidly expanding its engineering teams for software as it shifts 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 become more technologically-savvy following the explosion of popularity of online brick-building games like Roblox and Microsoft's Minecraft.



[ Also, InfoWorld: Where is software development headed in 2022?



Seeing the opportunity that was missed, Lego announced a partnership with the videogame maker Epic in April of this year. The companies will collaborate to create new experiences in the metaverse. This blurs the distinction between physical and digital building experiences.



"The partnership with Epic is our way to the metaverse, and there's a huge product piece to be worked on and a technology component to architect for that," Atul Bhhardwaj (group chief digital and technology officer at Lego Group) told InfoWorld.



Lego is looking to address these opportunities head on and build its in-house software engineering department. It is aiming to double its digital team to 1,800 by 2023. This will be based in offices in London, Shaghai, and Billund in Denmark.



Lego Digital transformation powered by Lego



Bhardwaj discusses how Lego can be more product-driven and engineering-led than it is today.



"I look at being product-led rather than project-led," he said, which means "defining the problems you have to solve as the digital products that you develop and build."



In the process of making Lego Group more engineering-led, Bhardwaj is keen to concentrate on architecture and craft. Minecraft-servers "What engineering skill do you require to be able create world-class, scalable systems?" He asks.



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



The construction of a cloud-native technology infrastructure



All of these goals will need to be underpinned by a strong digital infrastructure. Bhardwaj would like Lego to build systems that "can expand, run 24/7, and are flexible, open and easy to connect into."



[ Also on InfoWorld: How to hire and keep developers in a hybrid working environment ]



Lego is currently working on an all-encompassing platform for data and updating its infrastructure to allow it to be more flexible and cloud-native. Lego hosts 54% of its workloads in the cloud, in contrast to just 1% 18 months ago. Lego is aiming to be 100% in the public clouds in the future.



"We're going for speed, responsiveness, and flexibility, which the cloud provides," Bhardwaj said.



Lego Group employs a wide variety of frameworks and languages that range from Unity for certain of the new consumer-facing products, to React for Lego.com and SAP ABAP for back-office systems. Bhardwaj said that "we've got almost everything." "In the data platform we are using Scala & Python. What's cool today we are using is. If you are an engineer looking for a modern technology stack, you can find it here.



Connecting to the Lego story



Software and Lego go hand-in-hand. Many engineers like creating physical models whenever they have free time.



Bhardwaj said that each interviewee has a Lego story. "There is a connection with the brand."



Modular software components have for a long time been advertised for their Lego-like capabilities that allow them to "snap on" to other components. That idea now extends to how Lego itself creates software through loosely coupled systems and extensive use of APIs.



"When I discuss great architecture, it's similar to Lego bricks. We can construct something, tear it down, and then rebuild it over and over. That's what we're trying to create here," Bhardwaj said.


My Website: https://minecraft-servers.space/