Web Systems QA
Jagex

Abby M

00.02 My name’s Abby M, and I work at Jagex in work systems QA, I test all the modules and updates that go out into the website and internally as well to make sure that they are bug free before they go live.

00.14 I worked for Jagex actually for just over a year doing my placement. When I was at university I took a year out and came and worked in the player support department. After I finished my degree I came back to the role, I was invited to come back and then I was in player support again for about 3 months and it was actually very recently, just a month ago that I moved over to my web systems role, so I’m still a bit of a newbie at it.

00.35 I remember when my mum was at university actually, I was quite young, must have been about 7 or 8 and I used to get taken along to university with her, she was a mature student and I’d to have to sit there on the Mac and sort of tap away and play my little puzzle game. It sort of went from there, I started spending more and more of my time sort of playing with the computer and that’s where it all blossomed.

00.57 I had a sort of mini business running, it was actually embarrassingly it was doing hair extensions. I learnt how to do that and do it for a few of my mates. And when I look back on it now it actually gave me a lot of fundamental understanding of like how businesses need to be run and how much there is really involved in putting all this stuff together so that it works.

01.16 I was always kind of quite academic actually. When I was at secondary school, top of the class all the time. When I was finishing my A-Levels the two subjects that I was really enjoying the most was biology and IT. I think the Biology wasn’t something that I really felt had as much scope in the future for careers as having the IT background, so that’s why I headed for the computer career.

01.43 I think one of the biggest turning points for me in my career progression as it were was my placement year that I did when I was at university. When I started uni, I sort of, I picked a course that I think, even now I think probably wasn’t what I really should have done, I would have enjoyed something different a lot more. But taking the gap year coming to Jagex for a year really helped me decide where I wanted to go, I knew that I wanted to be in the gaming industry, I knew that I wanted to be doing programming rather than web so I took up Advanced C ++. It was pretty tough sort of settling into the new module, I mean I think more than anything was the fact that I’d been dumped in with these computing students and of course they’re all guys and they all sort of thought oh she doesn’t know what she’s doing, but then by the end of the year I got marked higher than pretty much all the computing students. So, I proved myself eventually, but it was hard work, putting the extra time in really made a lot of difference to my career so I’m really pleased I did it.

02.45 It’s always been sort of my mum, and my dad and my sister that have influenced me the most and sort of pushed me to go forwards. I do largely take after my dad, he’s an engineer and I am sort of very technical and I like taking things apart and seeing how they work so we have a lot of common ground there. My mums a graphic designer as well so that really kind of helped me with all the design aspects of when I was developing stuff at university.

03.11 At the moment I am actually renovating my house so pretty much all of my spare time is spent painting, and knocking down walls and all that sort of thing. I play a few games as well, I wouldn’t classify myself as a gamer but I do play a bit of Runescape – shamefully – don’t tell anyone.

03.30 I’m hoping to progress into something more technical really, I’d like to go into development, sort of programming roles, that’s what my background is. I love the feeling of knowing that I have somewhere to go with my job. Once you’re in Jagex you can move around almost freely into anything that you want to do, you know, so long as you’ve got the passion behind what you wanna do and to be able to push yourself that much further then you can really achieve anything, which is awesome.