Scape-what?

On the morning of Saturday 10th May 2025, in bright and sunny Liverpool, the Harker and Jamescape teams descended onto CENTRAL TECH (formerly Sensor City), Sciontec and KQ Liverpool’s newly branded space. Our mission: hold the fourth instalment of our annual company conference, Scapegoat!

Scapegoat is our chance to hold a weekend jam-packed full of technical discussions and workshops on everything from our company tone of voice, to inclusive interviews, to pitch practice, to tech documentation. Working in a fast-paced start-up can sometimes mean that these kind of discussions can be overlooked, so we bundle them all up into an annual excuse to get together for a weekend, which also works wonders for team-building and fostering collaboration.

This year’s conference also featured Scapegoat’s first external speaker - Professor Martin Gairing, Head of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Liverpool, who spoke about his career beginning in a tech start-up and then transitioning into academia. He also gave a brief explanation on his game theory research and how it can be used to predict road traffic patterns.

While we are a Liverpool-based team, some of our staff work remotely, so it’s incredible to get all staff from both companies together, collectively travelling a total of over 1000 miles to reach Liverpool!

Lightning Rounds

One of our favourite additions to Scapegoat that begun at last year’s conference are Lightning Rounds, three-minute talks given by every staff member on something that interests them. This year, we heard talks ranging from NASA's coding principles, to World of Warcraft bugs, to Charlie xcx. Congratulations to Max Kerslake (Operations Advisor at Harker/Jamescape) for winning the staff vote for Best Lightning Round for his talk on his work for a satire magazine at the University of York.

Beyond the workshops

After a day of collaboration, the team decided to hold a competitive game of Capture the Mascot, where we split into Harker and Jamescape teams and were tasked with hiding our company plush mascots, Vincent van Goat and Sir Liam, somewhere in CENTRAL TECH before trying to capture the other team’s mascot. This led to some high-speed chases down office corridors and a few moments where mascots where lobbed across the balcony of the atrium! A huge thank you to our partners at Sciontec, who allowed us to be the guinea pigs for their fantastic new Event Space at CENTRAL TECH, ahead of the building’s launch.

Throughout the conference, the team was fuelled by the tasty offerings from Burnt Orange, who provided breakfast pots and lunch bagels, and Veggie Republic, who provided curry for our formal evening dinner where we celebrated five years since Jamescape was incorporated back in May 2020. We invited previous staff and friends of the company to celebrate with us, before we held our iconic and infamous company awards show, the Scapies.

The Scapies featured a whopping 28 awards this year, celebrating everything from "Best Blog Post of the Year" to "Fastest Time to Merge a Pull Request", to some more interesting categories like "Slack Message of the Year" and "The ‘No offence, but how do you still have a job here?’ Award".

Scapegoat 2026?

This time last year, we welcomed a team of seven to Scapegoat, but in just one year we’ve doubled in size as we invited a joint team of 15 to Scapegoat 2025! Thanks to all of our staff, partners, and suppliers who made Scapegoat 2025 a huge success. Things really have changed since our humble first conference in 2022 and now Scapegoat is the most hectic, enjoyable, and productive time in the company calendar. Both teams are now more aligned, stronger, and bigger than ever, ready to achieve their respective missions through fit-for-purpose software.

Until the next one.