A picture of me

Welcome, my name is Paul Stovell. I live in Brisbane and work full time bootstrapping my own product company around Octopus Deploy, an automated deployment tool for .NET applications.

Prior to Octopus Deploy, I worked for an investment bank in London building WPF applications, and before that I worked for Readify, an Australian .NET consulting firm, where I was lucky enough to work with some of the best in the business. I also worked on a number of open source projects and was an active user group presenter. I've been a Microsoft MVP for WPF since 2006.

Recent posts

Configuring TeamCity to use HTTPS/SSL on Windows with a PFX file, and redirecting HTTP to HTTPS

The steps I followed to get TeamCity 7.1 to use HTTPS.

Consistent error handling with Nancy

Using the Nancy web framework, this is how I put together a unified, fairly simple approach to handling and rendering errors to API clients and web browsers.

Designing the Octopus Deploy 2.0 HTTP API

Rebuilding the Octopus web portal in Nancy, and goals for an API redesign

Predicting the future with Game Dev Tycoon

The lessons I learned about my startup by playing a video game about startups

Should have written it in Java

On building an ISV application atop the .NET and Windows stack.

Installing a Squid proxy server on Ubuntu 12.10 with NCSA authentication

A step by step guide to installing a Squid 3 proxy on Ubuntu 12.10 using and NCSA passwords file for testing code against proxy servers.

Selling software: the Dollar

Operating an Australian business where the US dollar dominates.

Selling software: quotes, purchase orders and resellers

When I started selling software online, I had no idea about purchase orders, resellers or quotes. Here's what I learned.

The best platform for blogging about coding

The answer, of course, is to build your own. Here's my third attempt.

Improving NuGet package extraction performance

Finding and fixing NuGet performance problems.

My startup

Octopus Deploy is a user-friendly automated deployment tool for professional .NET developers. Octopus is designed to make it incredibly easy to deploy ASP.NET websites and Windows Services onto remote machines, securely.

I started Octopus in 2011 in my spare time, when I was disappointed by the state of automated deployment for .NET developers. Since then it has grown to become my full time job. Learn more about where Octopus Deploy came from and why it exists.