Notes

Lego Embraces Modularity, Metaverse with its Software Engineering Culture

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By Scott Carey



Director of Editorial, News, InfoWorld



Lego the maker of plastic bricks, is rapidly expanding its teams of software developers to meet the increasing demand for virtual experiences.



Lego is expanding its software engineering team quickly as it expands its business from plastic bricks into bits and bytes. But is it able to compete with the top tech companies to recruit the best talent?



The Danish company is investing heavily in becoming more technologically-savvy following the explosive popularity of online brick-building games like Roblox and Microsoft's Minecraft.



[ Also, InfoWorld: Where is the direction of software development in 2022?



In April, Lego announced a partnership to Epic, a maker of videogames. The two companies will cooperate to create new experiences in the metaverse. This will blur the lines between digital building experiences and physical building experiences.



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



Lego is looking to tackle these challenges head-on and create 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.



Lego Digital Transformation powered by Lego



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



He said that he views as being project-led rather than product-led. This means that "the problems you solve are defined as a set digital products that you create and design."



In terms of making Lego Group more engineering-led, Bhardwaj wants to focus on craft and architecture. "What is the engineering skill you'd like to have in place to be able to create world-class scalable systems?" He asks.



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



Construction of a cloud-native technology infrastructure



These ambitions must be supported by strong digital architecture. Bhardwaj believes that Lego will create systems that can scale and operate 24 hours a day and are flexible, open, easy to connect to and are "scalable, operational 24/7", according to Bhardwaj.



[ Also, check out InfoWorld: How to retain and recruit developers in a hybrid environment of work



Lego is currently building a new unified data platform and is re-inventing its infrastructure to make it more flexible and cloud-native. Beginning with very little cloud usage just 18 months ago, Lego hosts 54% of its workloads on the cloud today, with plans to be 100% in the cloud public in the future.



"We're going for speed and responsiveness as well as flexibility, which the cloud can provide," Bhardwaj said.



Lego Group employs a wide range of frameworks and languages, from Unity for some of the latest consumer-facing products and to React for Lego.com, and SAP ABAP for back-office systems. "We've pretty much all the tools," Bhardwaj said. "In the data platform, we are using Scala and Python. What's new today is the technology we are using is. If you're an engineer in search for a new technology stack, you'll find it here.



Connecting to the Lego story



Lego and software have been a constant companion for a long time, as many engineers like making physical models in their spare time when they look to get away from their workstations.



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



Modular software components have been long marketed for their Lego-like capabilities that can "snap onto" other components. This idea is now extended to the way Lego creates software through loosely coupled systems and extensive use of APIs.
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"When I talk about amazing architecture, it's similar to Lego bricks, in which we can build something, break it apart and then rebuild it easily. "That's what we're trying to achieve here," Bhardwaj stated.


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