Notes

Lego Embraces Metaverse and Modularity in Its Software Engineering Culture

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By Scott Carey



Managing Editor, News, InfoWorld



Lego the maker of plastic bricks is rapidly growing its software development teams to meet the increasing demand for virtual experiences.



Lego is rapidly expanding its engineering teams in 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 transform into more technologically-savvy following the exploding popularity of online brick-building games like Roblox and Microsoft's Minecraft.



[ Also on InfoWorld: Where software development will be going in 2022]



Seeing the missed opportunity, Lego announced a partnership with the videogame maker Epic in April of this year. The two companies will collaborate to build new experiences in the metaverse, blurring lines between physical and digital creating experiences.
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"The partnership with Epic is our first step into the metaverse, and there is an enormous product component to develop and a technology component to architect for it," Atul Bhhardwaj (group chief digital and technology officer at Lego Group) told InfoWorld.



To tackle these opportunities head on, Lego is looking to create an in-house software engineering department and hopes to double its digital team to 1,800 by 2023, based across offices in Copenhagen and Billund in Denmark, London, and Shaghai.



The power of digital transformation at Lego



Bhardwaj explains how Lego can be more focused on product and engineering-led than it is today.



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 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 craft you'd like to have in place to be able to design world-class systems that can be scaled?" He asks.



Software engineers will continue to play significant roles, however, as the digital team grows, designers, product managers and technical program managers will also be needed.



Construction of a cloud-native technology infrastructure



All of these goals must be supported by a solid digital infrastructure. Bhardwaj hopes Lego will develop systems that can be scaled, operate 24/7, are flexible, open, easy to connect to, and are "scalable, operational all hours of the day", according to Bhardwaj.



[ Also on InfoWorld How to hire and keep developers in a hybrid working world



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



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



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. "We've basically all the tools," Bhardwaj said. "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 You'll find it here."



Connecting with the Lego story



Lego and software have been in constant contact, as many engineers enjoy making physical models in their spare time as they seek to get away from their workstations.



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



Modular software components have for a long time been promoted as Lego-like functionality that allows them to "snap on" to other components. This concept is now extended to how Lego creates software through loosely coupled systems and extensive use of APIs.



"When I speak about great architecture, it's like Lego bricks. We can construct something, tear it down and then rebuild it again. That's the kind of thing we're trying achieve here," Bhardwaj said.


Homepage: https://gameaff.com/