Notes

Lego Embraces Metaverse and Modularity in 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 rapidly expanding its software engineering teams as it expands its offerings 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 an increasingly technologically-driven business after the explosive popularity of online brick-building games, such as Roblox and Microsoft's Minecraft.



[ Also on InfoWorld What direction software development is headed in 2022 ]



Seeing the opportunity missed, Lego announced a partnership with the videogame maker Epic in April this year. The two companies will team up 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's an enormous product component to be worked on and an engineering component for it," Atul Bhhardwaj (group chief of technology and digital at Lego Group) told InfoWorld.



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



Lego: Digital transformation powered by Lego



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



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



Bhardwaj is determined to make Lego Group more engineering-led. He is keen to focus on craft and architecture. "What is the technical skill that you would 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 crucial roles, but as the digital team expands designers, product managers, and technical program managers will be needed.
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The development of a cloud-native technology infrastructure



These goals must be supported by strong digital architecture. Bhardwaj hopes Lego will develop systems that can be scaled, operate 24/7 and are flexible, open, easy to connect to and are "scalable and operational 24/7" according to Bhardwaj.



[ Also, check out InfoWorld How to keep and hire developers in a hybrid environment of work



The company is building a new data platform that is unified and refreshing its infrastructure to make it more flexible and cloud-native. Lego hosts 54% today of its workloads in the cloud, as opposed to just 1% 18 months ago. Lego has plans to reach 100% in the public clouds in the future.



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



Lego Group employs a wide range of languages and frameworks including Unity for some of the latest consumer-facing products, to React for Lego.com, and SAP ABAP for 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 interested in a modern tech stack You'll find it here."



Connecting to the Lego story



Lego and software have been in constant contact Many engineers like making physical models in their spare time when they seek to escape their workstations.



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



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



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


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