Notes

Lego Embraces Modularity, Metaverse with its Software Engineering Culture

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By Scott Carey



The Managing Editor, News, InfoWorld



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



Lego is rapidly expanding its engineering teams in software as it diversifies from plastic bricks to bits and bytes but is it able to compete with top tech companies for the most talented engineers?



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



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



Seeing the opportunity missed, Lego announced a partnership with the videogame maker Epic in April this year. The two companies will work together to create new experiences in the metaverse, blurring the lines between digital and physical building experiences.



"The partnership with Epic represents our journey into the metaverse, and there is a huge product piece to be worked on and the technology component to design for that," Atul Bhhardwaj (group chief of technology and digital at Lego Group) told InfoWorld.



Lego is looking to address these challenges head-on and create its own department of software engineering. It is aiming to double its digital workforce to 1,800 by 2023. This will be based in offices in London, Shaghai, and Billund in Denmark.



Lego Digital Transformation powered by Lego



To power that transformation Bhardwaj discusses making Lego more product-led, engineering-led and architecture-led.



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 of digital products that you create and design."



Bhardwaj is keen to make Lego Group more engineering-led. He is keen to focus on the craft and architecture. "What is the technical skill 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 an an important role, but as the digital team grows, designers, product managers and technical program managers will be required.



The development of a cloud-native technology infrastructure



These goals must be backed by strong digital architecture. Bhardwaj is looking for Lego to build systems that "can scale, operate 24/7 and are open, flexible, and easy to connect into."



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



The company is building a new unified data platform and refreshing 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 100% in the cloud public in the future.
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Bhardwaj declared that "We are going for speed as well as flexibility, responsiveness and speed which is what the cloud provides us."



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 said that "We've got nearly everything." "In the data platform, we are using Scala and Python. What's new today is the technology we are using is. If you are an engineer who is interested in a modern tech stack You'll find it here."



Connecting to the Lego story



Software and Lego go hand-in-hand. Many engineers like making physical models when they have time off.



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



Modular software components have been promoted for their Lego-like capabilities that allows them to "snap onto" other components. This idea extends to Lego's software building process which makes use of APIs and loosely connected systems.



"When I talk about great architecture, it is similar to Lego bricks, where we can construct something, then break it up and then rebuild it easily. "That's what we're trying create here," Bhardwaj stated.


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