What we’ve built.

An occupier database for a property investment firm

Everything the firm holds, in one structure — company, portfolio, estate, property, unit — with the occupiers in each, the leases behind them, the agents who introduced them, and the estates the firm is looking at buying. Staff sign in, search it, and take any filtered list out to a spreadsheet. It replaced a set of spreadsheets that only worked if one particular person was in the office.

TenureBook

Our own product, and the same idea sold off the shelf: a property portfolio kept in one book — every occupier, every lease, every key date. Open it and the dates are on the screen. It sends nothing. It does not email anybody, it does not alert anybody and it chases no one, which is a decision rather than an omission: a system that emails people gets muted, and then it is worse than nothing. It also puts together the reports and packs somebody would otherwise assemble by hand.

This website

Plain pages with no framework behind them, served from Cloudflare’s network. The enquiry and booking forms run as small pieces of server code that write the enquiry to a database and send the email, and every form carries a bot check. Before any of it can be published, a set of checks reads every page and refuses the publish if a tag is left open, an id is used twice, a label points at nothing, a heading level skips, a link goes nowhere, or a styling rule has been quietly thrown away by the browser. That last one exists because it happened: this site once lost two hundred and sixty-five text sizes to a missing space and nobody noticed for a month.

The Tiber Course website

Tiber Course Ltd is a sister company, also Ben’s: short online compliance training for UK staff. Dopara built and runs its website.

The tools we run this company on

Internal. Nobody outside Dopara uses these and none of them is for sale. They are on this page because they are the clearest picture of what we build when there is no client to please — and because we would rather show you working software than a list of technologies.

HQ is a desktop application over the whole business: the day’s jobs, the deals, the money, the notes, read out of a set of plain files and a database, and written back the same way. The mail service sends and files the company’s own email inside hard limits it will not go past — a daily ceiling, a warm-up ramp, and a stop switch that turns the whole schedule off rather than carrying on. The tender watcher reads the two feeds where councils and other public bodies publish what they are buying, a day at a time, and keeps a ledger of what is open, who won it, for how much, and when it comes up for renewal. It reads and does nothing else: it registers for nothing and submits nothing.