In 2025 I embarked on the mission of changing industries and joining the games industry. I had only worked in the Retail and Public Transport sectors since leaving school. Since I had no qualifications or degree, I tailored my CV around the technical skills I’d learned in my personal time and the soft skills I’d picked up in my roles up to that point. At the beginning of 2026 I was given the incredible opportunity to become a Junior Tech / Engine QA Analyst at a well known game developer.
At the time of writing this post, I have been with this company for just under 7 months and passed my probation 6 months in. It would be an understatement to say I’ve learned more than I could have ever imagined in such a short period of time. Throughout my time in the Tech team I have found myself increasingly interested in how the game client works and the work Engine Developers do, I continuously ask the Client and Engine Developers what changes they made to resolve a certain issue, and read the commits to solidify what they’ve told me.
This led to me contacting the Lead Game Engine Developer and asking their advice on how I could build my skills and become a more valuable member of the team, particularly around understanding stack traces from crashes and errors more thoroughly. They kindly showed me some of the personal projects they’d worked on after leaving university and gave me some pointers on what would help me get there, one of them being to learn C++.
And here we are. This is the start of my goal to learn C++. I don’t know yet how far I’ll get or how long it’ll take but I know the only way I got this far in QA was by asking questions and writing things down until they made sense. So that’s what this is.
There are naïve questions, tedious questions, ill-phrased questions, questions put after inadequate self-criticism. But every question is a cry to understand the world. There is no such thing as a dumb question.
— Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World