I'm Tom Filepp. I run a solo practice building and modernizing content, audio, and classification systems — the kind of work where the platform has real users, real history, and no room to fall over. Fixed-scope audits, fractional CTO engagements, and focused builds. Priced up front, delivered in weeks, not quarters.

What people hire me for

Concrete outcomes, not a skill cloud.

  • Figure out why their content ingestion pipeline is fragile, and produce a written plan for fixing it.
  • Classify a large catalog — genres, topics, tags — when manual tagging isn't realistic and generic LLM calls aren't accurate enough.
  • Modernize a Laravel codebase — upgrades, performance, local dev environments, queue config — without stalling feature work.
  • Plan a frontend migration (Vue 2 to 3, React to Vue, incremental TypeScript) that ships instead of stalling.
  • Advise at the CTO level for pre-seed and seed-stage startups: architecture, hiring, vendor decisions, investor DD.
  • Audit an audio or music platform architecture from someone who has actually built them.
Selected work

Four detailed case studies.

  • Revolver USA20-year relationship. Content ingestion, NLP-based genre classification across a ~100K-product catalog, and the audio preview pipeline behind their store.
  • CASH MusicSenior engineer and later de facto tech lead on the open-source artist platform before it folded in 2020. Led the platform re-engineering effort.
  • Sky TherapeuticsDe facto technical co-founder for a digital therapeutics startup. Designed the full technical roadmap, infrastructure, and hiring process from zero.
  • XRAY.fmBuilt the multi-tenant podcast hosting platform for the Portland nonprofit radio station, including RSS syndication and dynamic ad-stitching.