Notes

Lego Embraces Modularity, Metaverse with its Software Engineering Culture

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By Scott Carey







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



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



The Danish company is investing heavily to transform into an increasingly technologically-driven business after the explosion of popularity of online brick-building games, such as Roblox and Microsoft's Minecraft.



[ Also on InfoWorld What direction software development will be going in 2022 ]



In April, Lego announced a partnership to Epic, a game maker. The two companies will work together to create new experiences in the metaverse, blurring lines between physical and digital building experiences.



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



To tackle these opportunities head on, Lego is looking to build out its in-house software engineering team with the aim of increase its digital workforce by 1,800 people by 2023. It will be spread across offices in Copenhagen and Billund in Denmark, London, and Shaghai.



Digital transformation powered by Lego



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



"I consider myself to be product-led rather than project-led," he said, which means "defining the problems you have to solve as a set of digital products that you create and create."



In the process of making Lego Group more engineering-led, Bhardwaj would like to focus on the craft and architecture. "What is the engineering skill that you'd like to have in place in order to engineer world-class scalable systems?" He asks.



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



Implementing a cloud-native technology platform



These goals must be backed by a strong digital architecture. Bhardwaj hopes Lego will create systems that are scalable, operate 24/7 and are flexible, open and easy to connect to, and can be connected to.



[ Also on InfoWorld: How to hire and retain developers in a multi-faceted working world



Lego is currently working on an entirely new platform for data, and is updating its infrastructure to allow it to be more flexible and cloud-native. Lego hosts 54% today 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.



Bhardwaj said that "we're seeking speed, responsiveness and flexibility, which is exactly what the cloud provides us."



Lego Group employs a wide variety of frameworks and languages, from Unity for certain of the new consumer-facing products and to React for Lego.com, and SAP ABAP for back-office systems. "We've pretty much got everything," Bhardwaj said. "In the data platform we are using Scala and Python. We are using the latest technology today. If you are an engineer interested in an advanced tech stack You'll find it here."



Connecting to the Lego story



Software and Lego have been a constant companion for a long time Many engineers like building physical models in their spare time as they seek to get away from their workstations.



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



Modular software components have been long advertised for their Lego-like capabilities that can "snap onto" other components. Swissrocketman.com This concept extends to Lego's software building process that makes use of APIs as well as loosely connected systems.



"When I speak about great architecture, it's similar to Lego bricks. We can construct something, then take it apart and then reassemble it all over again. "That's what we're trying create here," Bhardwaj stated.


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