Notes

Lego Embraces Metaverse and Modularity in Its Software Engineering Culture

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By Scott Carey







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



Lego is expanding its engineering team in software rapidly as it transforms from plastic bricks into bits and bytes. But can it be competitive with the top tech companies to recruit the best talent?



The Danish company is investing heavily to become an increasingly technologically-driven business after the exploding popularity of online brick-building games like Roblox and Microsoft's Minecraft.



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Seeing the opportunity that was missed, Lego announced a partnership with the videogame maker Epic in April of this year. The two companies will team up to create new experiences in the metaverse, blurring lines between physical and digital creating experiences.



"The partnership with Epic is our way to the metaverse, and there is an enormous product component to work upon and the technology component to design for that," Atul Bhhardwaj (group chief digital and technology officer at Lego Group) told InfoWorld.



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



The power of digital transformation at Lego



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



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



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



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



The development of a cloud-native infrastructure



These goals must be supported by a solid digital architecture. Bhardwaj would like Lego to create systems that "can grow, operate 24 hours a day and are flexible, open, and easy to connect to."



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



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 18 months ago, Lego hosts 54% of workloads in the cloud today, with ambitions to be completely in the public cloud in the future.



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



Lego Group uses a variety of frameworks and languages. These include Unity for new consumer-facing products to React for Lego.com and SAP ABAP back-office systems. Just another wordpress site "We've pretty much got everything," Bhardwaj said. "In the data platform, we're using Scala and Python. What's cool today we are using. If you're an engineer who is interested in a modern tech stack, then you'll find it here."



Connecting to the Lego story



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



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



Modular software components have been long promoted for their Lego-like capabilities, which can "snap onto" other components. This concept is also applicable to Lego's software building system, which uses APIs and loosely connected systems.



"When I describe amazing architecture, it's like Lego bricks, in which we can build something, break it apart and then rebuild it easily. That's the kind of thing we're trying create here," Bhardwaj said.


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