Fair and Transparent: A deep dive into compensation at Octopus Deploy

Over 10 years, we've crafted a highly transparent, systematic approach to compensation where fairness and equity happen “by design."

Octopus milestones in 2024

Octopus passed 300 employees and A$100M in ARR. A snapshot of where we are in 2024.

DevEx Connect

Last week, Ethan Sumner announced the launch of DevEx Connect: DevEx Connect is a community-driven, independent research, analysis, and events organisation operating within the DevEx umbrella, which includes DevOps, SRE, Developer Experience, Platform Engineering, Cloud, and AI. Over the next 12 months, we plan to host a global DevEx Connect

Octopus Deploy in 2021

2021 is the year we unfurled our tentacles - literally!

Customers as investors

Octopus is a bootstrapped software company, and so there are no investors that have put money "into" the business. As a result, every dollar we've ever used to build our business has come from customers. There's something humbling and powerful about this. The fate

Highly-measurable upside vs. immeasurable downside

There's this pattern that emerges in engineering, marketing, and a lot of other things that we do. I suspect somebody has already named it - some law or maxim - but I've not seen it written somewhere. I describe it as the "highly-measurable upside vs.

Publishing the Octopus Handbook

We published a public handbook for our remote-first company.

Octopus Deploy in 2020

This post is a summary of Octopus Deploy as of May 2020. Our team, our customers, what we do, and how we see the DevOps automation world.

A new blog for 2020

Hello, is this thing on? It's a while since I wrote on this blog 😀

Why we terminated our partnership with Microsoft - Re: Next decade of open source

Aaron Stanard published a blog post about The Next Decade of .NET Open Source [http://www.aaronstannard.com/next-decade-dotnet/]. It's a good summary of recent conversations and there's a lot to agree with in the post. In particular, I agree strongly with this point: > If

Re: Tyranny of NuGet

This is an old post and doesn't necessarily reflect my current thinking on a topic, and some links or images may not work. The text is preserved here for posterity.My old friend Mitch Denny (it's been a while!) wrote about the Tyranny of NuGet [http:

Introducing Service Bouncer

As a developer building Windows Services, the workflow of constantly stopping and starting services can be a bit annoying, especially if your solution consists of multiple services. ServiceBouncer [https://github.com/PaulStovell/ServiceBouncer] is a simple, open source tool that helps to streamline this workflow.

Octopus

My 2014 Year in Review

This is an old post and doesn't necessarily reflect my current thinking on a topic, and some links or images may not work. The text is preserved here for posterity.At the start of the year I wrote about how 2014 would be my year to focus on

Business of Software

The cost of support: solving problems vs. just responding to tickets

This is an old post and doesn't necessarily reflect my current thinking on a topic, and some links or images may not work. The text is preserved here for posterity.Providing good customer support is the most important part of running a software business. When dealing with a

Octopus

Growing into an office

This is an old post and doesn't necessarily reflect my current thinking on a topic, and some links or images may not work. The text is preserved here for posterity.Our team at Octopus has grown a lot this year, and we're going to be even

Software Engineering

Hybrid storage: Git+SQLite vs. RavenDB?

This is an old post and doesn't necessarily reflect my current thinking on a topic, and some links or images may not work. The text is preserved here for posterity.In Octopus, we use RavenDB as our database [https://octopus.com/blog/how-we-use-ravendb] for almost everything. Over time,

Software Engineering

When "safe by default", isn't.

This is an old post and doesn't necessarily reflect my current thinking on a topic, and some links or images may not work. The text is preserved here for posterity.We use RavenDB in Octopus, and one of the features Raven promotes is the idea of Safe by

Projects

Introducing TenderSmash

This is an old post and doesn't necessarily reflect my current thinking on a topic, and some links or images may not work. The text is preserved here for posterity.We use Tender [http://tenderapp.com] for most of the Octopus Deploy support [http://help.octopusdeploy.com]. I

Software Industry

StartupAUS report: How to enable more Australian startups

This is an old post and doesn't necessarily reflect my current thinking on a topic, and some links or images may not work. The text is preserved here for posterity.StartupAUS published a report highlighting some of the issues that startup founders in Australia face. It's

Business of Software

Growing in Unison

This is an old post and doesn't necessarily reflect my current thinking on a topic, and some links or images may not work. The text is preserved here for posterity.There are many dimensions to a business: * Product * Support * Marketing * Sales * Operations * Partners * Vision At any given time,

#NotAnMVP

This is an old post and doesn't necessarily reflect my current thinking on a topic, and some links or images may not work. The text is preserved here for posterity.In April 2006 I received a Microsoft MVP award [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Most_Valuable_Professional]

Business of Software

Selling software: Processing Orders

This is an old post and doesn't necessarily reflect my current thinking on a topic, and some links or images may not work. The text is preserved here for posterity.This post is part of a little series I've been writing about selling software. In this

2014: Focus on growth

This is an old post and doesn't necessarily reflect my current thinking on a topic, and some links or images may not work. The text is preserved here for posterity.I'm a developer by trade, and I've never had any interest in marketing. In

Back on LinkedIn

This is an old post and doesn't necessarily reflect my current thinking on a topic, and some links or images may not work. The text is preserved here for posterity.12 months ago I blogged about how I'd left LinkedIn [https://paulstovell.com/blog/cost-of-social-networks]. At