Notes on Joining The LEGO® Group and The LEGO® Tech Summit
The LEGO Tech Summit is an annual internal event that brings together all the ET&A teams (Engagement Technology and Analytics) at The LEGO Group. We invite anyone interested in our tech choices and processes to join in, hear talks and have discussions about what we are doing. For anyone working with Engagement Engineering it can be particularly helpful. It’s a great opportunity for knowledge sharing and closer collaboration, and a chance to help shape a shared tech vision for the future of The LEGO Group, in every sense.
We also had our annual Team Day taking place the day before, which encourages the ET&A teams to get to know each other, as well as including a few talks on how the company is doing.
Day 1- Team Building in Billund
Being flown to Billund, Denmark on my first day at work for The LEGO Group was rather incredible. Everything was really well planned and already taken care of. I had a lovely Brickmate who was assigned to look out for me and show me the ways of the company and I felt really welcome.
Everyone was friendly and helpful, and the atmosphere was excited, but still remained professional. It felt a little unreal at times. Stepping off the plane and being driven to the hotel on my first evening of a new job was certainly out of the ordinary for me.
We stayed at the Hotel Propellen, which was friendly and comfortable, and the food was really good. Although I honestly wasn’t a fan of some of the more salty dishes!
The LEGO Group’s Vision
The Team Day started with an update on the company’s current trajectory and an introduction to their tech vision for the future, which I felt resonated a lot with me.
Jørgen Vig Knudstorp was giving the keynote, and he did a great job of telling the story of The LEGO Group. He was very engaging and charismatic. I had watched a lot of documentaries and videos before starting at The LEGO Group, but somehow he managed to deliver a fresh take, with new interesting facts that I hadn’t heard before. He very neatly explained The LEGO Group’s story and current position from a business perspective too, which was a really good way to learn about the company and was the best ‘onboarding’ session I had!
The LEGO Group clearly show that, as a company, they really do have a love of bringing joy to children. They also care about nurturing children’s development and giving them valuable skills for the future through play, and with a very positive, child-centered approach. This ethos is also visible in their approach to their teams and employees. They encourage learning and upskilling, with a healthy amount of friendly competition. The environment is very supportive and helps employees to perform their best and reach for a shared vision as well as achieve their personal goals.
The current management team are very driven to bringing the company up to speed with the technology available to us. This ranges from internal bureaucratic processes, all the way to imagining a future of the brick that involves AI. The long-term vision is to have very unique and individually tailored experiences to enhance people’s experience of LEGO products. I feel it is a very exciting time to be joining an engineering team within the company!
LEGO® Education SPIKE™ Prime Set
Our first activity for team building was a 3 hour activity with SPIKE Prime — a new robotic member of The LEGO Education range — which was led by The FIRST LEGO League.
The activity was a competition with the goal of programming SPIKE Prime using Scratch (a visual programming language), to carry out various ‘tasks’ on a play-mat which represented a city. There were various components that were part of the obstacle-like course in the city. There were blocks representing houses, with neat additions like a ‘solar panel roof’ and ‘roof garden’. There was a bat to hang in a tree, to emphasise a ‘green city’ theme, along with someone in a wheelchair who needed an accessible space.
The activity was very fast paced, with three rounds of building and a test of what was built after each round, and each activity awarded us points which were tallied, to discover which team would create the winning SPIKE-bot. The winning team each received a gorgeous, rather large, LEGO trophy cup. I thoroughly enjoyed the activity. I particularly loved the ‘green city’ touches. Having the city mapped out visually on the play-mat helped for an even more exciting and immersive experience. FIRST LEGO League is a great competition with very enthusiastic volunteers on hand to help out. I definitely recommend checking them out!
Investigating a Robbery
To break up the team building day, we also took part in a 3 hour ‘murder mystery’ activity, organised by a company that provides enthusiastic actors and some cool props (including an eerily realistic human heart!). It was a lot of fun working with a small group of colleagues and investigating the different aspects of the mystery.
It was a great way of bonding more closely with people I may otherwise not have spent time with! We didn’t solve the puzzle, and it turns out our group was way too easily misdirected. I was quite frustrated that I ignored my instincts, so next time I take part in something like this, I hope I will have learned not to be so easily misled!
Day 2 — The Tech Summit Talks
You Can’t Choose Your Family But You Can Choose Your Dependencies by Ryan Cutter
Twitter: @_rycu
- You should always take some time to research your dependencies, rushing is not going to help in the long term.
- Be aware of 3rd party dependencies having dependencies of their own
- Check on Github to see if their issues are addressed swiftly and if their updates and maintenance are in line with that type of package (some less complex packages shouldn’t need updates so often)
- Size in numbers is often a great case for open source software, but be aware that this could actually mean less well maintained documentation and less robust code
- Never try to force a dependency to fit what you want it for by hacking it and trying to adapt the code. If it isn’t the best fit, keep looking!
- Equally, never try to fit your own code around a dependency by changing it excessively
- However, if a dependency is almost a perfect fit, consider raising an issue on the project Github, the team may just be able to help!
- Be wary of the dependency size, particularly if you are using it in production
- Size doesn’t always have to be an issue, for example when you are choosing something that will never be put in front of external users
- Size isn’t always an issue for mobile either, however remember that your app may end up being the first to go when a user runs out of space!
The main takeaways were that you should choose your dependencies wisely, with care, and with as much communication across your team as possible.
Serverless on AWS by Pal Maszlik
Twitter: @paulmaszlik
- Pal neatly covered the idea behind serverless, which is to have more modular architecture that can scale on demand and not create unnecessary costs
- Serverless is compatible with multiple tools and systems and across many key languages
- The talk centered on Amazon Web Services, and Amazon Lambda, which is in use by the Shopper Engagement Team at The LEGO Group
- AWS Lambda functions exist to make sure that any changes can be more targeted and effective, and can be implemented faster. They take a triggering event and return an output
- We were taken through a very thorough and engaging example of using AWS Lambda with the team’s monorepo, which has around 150 serverless functions and 29 services!
I left feeling I understood a lot more about how The LEGO Group use AWS Lambda.
A note on Open Source
The closing keynote was all about open source software. It was clear that everyone in attendance was very positive about creating a culture of sharing and growing together, and that open source software is an aspiration for The LEGO group. For now, we are very focused on improving ‘inner source’, which means making internal processes smoother and more collaborative. That journey is picking up traction and it felt like it was a clear aspiration that was communicated very positively at our tech summit.
There were clear action points to take away from the keynote, which mostly centered on improving communication and methods of sharing our work. The LEGO Group has high hopes that at some point we will be able to completely open source some resources. The LEGO Tech Summit is a great new initiative that is pivotal in making this vision of sharing and closer cooperation a reality.
Hannah Tucker McLellan is a Junior Application Engineer at The LEGO Group
Twitter: @hannahintech
