About

I’m Conrad Rockenhaus: independent developer, infrastructure operator, and Navy combat veteran. This site is where I keep engineering notes, occasional findings, and the front doors to the things my crew and I build and run.

What I build

The flagship is Vivijure, a self-hosted AI film studio I wrote with my crew at Skyphusion Labs. Storyboard, cast, render orchestration on Cloudflare Workers, swappable GPU backends (your own iron, RunPod by the second, or cloud i2v APIs), and a CPU container media stack so concat, mux, and finishing work stay off the GPU bill. Free, AGPL-3.0, not for sale, never gated. Meet it at vivijure.skyphusion.org/welcome.

Around that sits Prism (multimodal AI playground), Postern (email for humans and agents), The Hollow Grid (federated MUD), Common Thread (OSINT attribution), and more. All open source. All yours to fork.

Skyphusion Labs

Everything ships under github.com/skyphusion-labs. The lab’s home page is skyphusion.org; the org’s GitHub landing page is github.skyphusion.org.

The crew

Skyphusion Labs is not just me. Each collaborator has their own GitHub profile and README:

• Conrad Rockenhaus
• Mackaye
• Strummer
• Rollins
• Joan
• Ernst

What I run

I operate my own infrastructure end to end, because owning the whole stack is the point. Skyphusion Labs is not a side project that fits on one box; the products we ship need real capacity behind them.

Today that looks like:

• Six dedicated servers for CPU work (crew boxes, controllers, mail edge, DNS, CI runners, and the long-running services that do not belong on serverless)
• One dedicated GPU server for local render dev, conformance gates, and iron we own outright
• Four cloud instances (bastions, mesh connectors, and the co-located VMs that wire the fleet to the public internet)
• Thirty GPU serverless workers on RunPod for burst render and inference without keeping high-end silicon hot at idle

Everything is wired through infrastructure-as-code where it can be: Cloudflare Tunnels for inbound, nftables on the door, GitHub Actions for CI, and chezmoi for the configs that have to survive a rebuild.

The split is simple: skyphusion.net is my engineering blog; skyphusion.org is the lab’s front door. My public Michigan court record lives at rockenhaus.net (also litigation.rockenhaus.net).

Around the web

• Engineering blog: skyphusion.net (this site)
• Public court record: rockenhaus.net
• Skyphusion Labs: skyphusion.org
• Labs GitHub landing page: github.skyphusion.org
• My GitHub landing page: github.skyphusion.net
• GitHub profile: github.com/skyphusion
• The code: github.com/skyphusion-labs
• Vivijure welcome: vivijure.skyphusion.org/welcome
• X: x.com/skyphusion (verified)
• Facebook: facebook.com/skyphusion (Meta Verified)
• Instagram: instagram.com/skyphusion (Meta Verified)
• Email: conrad@skyphusion.org

Tools of choice

macOS as a daily driver. Cloudflare Workers as a deployment platform. Self-hosting over SaaS wherever it makes sense. Node managed through nvm, configs kept honest, and a strong preference for understanding a system rather than trusting it.

Service

Before any of this, I served in the Navy, with deployments to Kosovo and Afghanistan attached to fire-support and signals-intelligence units. It shaped how I work: direct, prepared, and allergic to hand-waving.

Off the keyboard

When I’m not in a terminal, I’m usually deep in a home automation rabbit hole (HomeKit and Thread, mostly) or playing with home audio stuff.

Contact

Reach me at conrad@skyphusion.org.