Written by someone who used to walk the doors himself

I'm James Hobden. I'm British, I'm retired, and these days I live in South Africa. Before that I spent more than eight years at Heathrow as a senior project manager for British Airways, and for three of those years I was the fire warden for my team.

Heathrow does something to your sense of risk. From our windows we watched a wide-body aircraft land every couple of minutes. An aircraft is a very large amount of fuel with people inside it, and the thought of one coming down short of the runway, and what a fire like that would do to a building full of colleagues, never quite left me. It is why I put my hand up to be the warden.

Being the warden gave me a question I could not get answered. The fire doors along our corridors: were they being inspected? By whom? How often? Nobody I asked could tell me, and I could not find a record anywhere. So I did what a warden with a conscience does. Every so often I walked the doors myself. Did it close on its own. Did it latch. Was anything wedged against it. Was the seal there, and was it in one piece. Not a formal inspection, and I never claimed it was. Just eyes on the door, so that if the day ever came, I knew we could actually use it.

That question, is anyone checking, and where is the record, is the whole reason this software exists.

I hold an MSc in computer science, and I spent a career delivering systems for an airline that has no patience for things that half work. I am not a fire door inspector, and DoorPass is not my opinion about your doors. It is a place to put your inspections, with the photographs, the dates and the history, so that the question I could never get answered at Heathrow has an answer in your buildings: yes, this door, by this person, on this date, and here is the picture.

DoorPass records what the inspector enters and reports on that record. It never decides whether a door, a building or a firm passes anything. That judgement is yours; it always was. Your records stay yours, and you can export all of them whenever you like.

I built DoorPass in retirement, with no investors and nobody to answer to but the people who use it. That is why the price is one flat amount a month per person, why there is no charge per door or per scan or per photograph, and why the email below reaches me and not a ticket queue.

If you inspect fire doors and something in DoorPass is wrong, missing, or just annoying, tell me. I read every message and I answer them myself.

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