Notes

Lego Embraces Modularity, Metaverse with its Software Engineering Culture

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By Scott Carey







Lego the plastic brick manufacturer, is expanding its teams of software developers quickly to meet the growing demand for virtual experiences.



Lego is expanding its engineering team for software rapidly as it diversifies from plastic bricks to bits and bytes. But can it compete with the best tech companies to attract the most talented engineers?



The Danish company is investing heavily to transform into more technologically-savvy following the explosive popularity of online brick-building games such as Roblox and Microsoft's Minecraft.



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



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



"The partnership with Epic is our journey into the metaverse. There is a big product piece there to be worked on as well as an engineering piece for that," Atul Bhardwaj, the group's chief digital and technology officer at Lego Group told InfoWorld.
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To tackle these opportunities head on, Lego is looking to build out its internal software engineering team with the aim of increase its digital workforce by 1,800 by the end of 2023, based across offices in Copenhagen and Billund in Denmark, London, and Shaghai.



The power of digital transformation at Lego



To power that transformation, Bhardwaj talks about making Lego more product-led, engineering-led and architectural-led.



"I think of myself as being product-led as opposed to project-led," he said, which means "defining the issues you tackle as an array of digital products that you create and create."



Bhardwaj is keen to make Lego Group more engineering-focused by placing emphasis on craft and architecture. "What is the engineering skill that you want to have in place to design world-class systems that can be scaled?" He asks.



Software engineers will continue to play an an important role, but as the digital team expands, digital designers, product managers , and technical program managers will also be required.



Building a cloud-native technology infrastructure



All of these plans will require to be backed by a solid digital architecture. Bhardwaj hopes Lego will create systems that can be scaled, operate 24/7 and are flexible, flexible and easy to connect, and can be connected to.



[ Also, check out InfoWorld: How to retain and hire developers in a multi-faceted world of work



The company is currently developing an all-encompassing platform for data and is currently updating its infrastructure to make it more flexible and cloud-native. Lego hosts 54% today of its workloads in the cloud, compared to just 1% months ago. The company has ambitions to achieve 100% of cloud services in the near future.



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



Lego Group uses a variety of frameworks and languages. This includes Unity for its new consumer-facing products as well as React for Lego.com and SAP ABAP back-office systems. Bhardwaj declared that "we've got almost everything." "In the data platform, we are using Scala and Python. We are using the latest technology today. If you are an engineer in search of an innovative tech stack, you will find it here.



Connecting to the Lego story



Lego and software are a perfect match. Many engineers love creating physical models whenever they have spare time.



Bhardwaj stated that every interviewee has a Lego story. "There is connective tissue there."



Modular software components have been long advertised for their Lego-like utility that allows them to "snap onto" other components. This idea is also applicable to Lego's software building process which makes use of APIs and loosely connected systems.



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


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