For Practitioners
You own the wisdom. I build the platform.
Ninth House Studios partners with practitioners and teachers — astrologers,
readers, guides, keepers of small lineages — who have depth and an audience,
but whose technology doesn't do them justice.
The arrangement is simple: you own the content and the voice. I design,
build, and run the platform. We shape the presentation together. We share the
revenue. You never touch a server, a payment processor, or a deploy. Your
people get an experience worthy of your work.
What that looks like in practice:
84beings.com — a living platform for the Aditya
system: an interactive chart explorer, a visual world, reports, and commerce,
built and operated by the studio in partnership with the astrologer who
carries the tradition.
And the studio's own apps —
SunFlare and InnerOrbits
— show the house style: simple, beautiful, encounter over education. You
shouldn't need to study lunar astrology to feel the moon's rhythm; your
audience shouldn't need to be students to be met by your work.
A good fit: you have a body of work and people who trust you, and you're
ready for it to live somewhere worthy of it.
Not a fit: you want a website built and handed off. This is a
partnership, not an agency gig.
josh@ninthhouse.studio
Custom Software
For people who do the work.
I build tools that make one person or a small team more capable — not
tools that replace them.
The AI industry is racing to remove humans from loops. I'm going the other
direction. The tools I build keep you in the driver's seat: they extend your
reach, sharpen your judgment, and handle the parts that were slowing you
down — so you can go deeper into the work that's actually yours.
I built my own toolchain this way.
Sutra gives me code
intelligence — ranked symbol search, call graphs, blast-radius analysis — so
I understand what I'm changing before I change it.
Yojana tracks my task
graph with dependency edges, so I know what's blocked and what's ready. Both
are Rust, both are MCP servers, and I use them every day to build everything
else. They don't write code for me. They make me a better engineer.
When I need something that doesn't exist, I build it.
swisseph-rs
is a pure Rust port of the Swiss Ephemeris — 50,000 lines of astronomical
calculation, stateless, bit-compatible with the upstream C library. I wrote it
because my apps needed a clean foundation. I also wrote
swisseph.dart,
pure Dart bindings for the same engine, because the existing Flutter plugin
wouldn't work for what I was building. If the tool I need doesn't exist yet,
that's not a blocker — it's a project.
What I build depends on what you need. It might be an MCP server that gives
your AI tools access to your product data. It might be a custom workflow that
fits how you actually work instead of how a vendor thinks you should. It might
be something that has nothing to do with AI — just good software, built well,
for a specific problem. I need to understand your situation before I design
anything.
Who this is for: Small teams, solo founders, independent
businesses — people who are involved in their products and want to use AI to
do more than they could alone, without handing the wheel to the machine. If
you want to ship 500 commits while you sleep, I'm not your person. If you
want to build something real and stay close to it, let's talk.
josh@ninthhouse.studio
My Story
I learned this way of working long before I could name it. For about seven years I lived
in Washington state, immersed in the community around Wilderness Awareness School. The
centerpiece of that life was the Inipi Society — a traditional Lakota sweat lodge
community — where I was the main fire tender for most of those years. I was responsible
for facilitating the transfer of the energy of the Sun that is stored in the wood into our
Inipi stones. At the week-long Art of Mentoring programs I served twice on Ring 3, the
support crew attached to the clans, and once as a cook. The roles were different, but
the work had the same essence: prepare the ground, tend the fire, hold the conditions so
that what happens in the circle can happen. A well-tended fire looks effortless to the
people gathered around it. That's the point. Everything this studio makes is a form of
fire-tending.
My path has always favored breadth over singular focus. I studied the viola from sixth
grade, participating in my local youth orchestra and, briefly, Indiana University's
School of Music. After obtaining a degree in mathematics I spent years learning how to
connect to nature, self and others at Wilderness Awareness School. Then inner
cartographies caught my attention: Human Design first, and then, when I realized I
needed to understand the planets which are its foundation, Vedic astrology — studied in
intensive stretches over several years, deeply enough to know the systems from the
inside. By early 2026 I understood something important: I don't want to be a reader. I'm
not attached to this lineage or that one, or to any particular zodiac. What I wanted was
to create — and with modern AI as a collaborator, one person can now build what used to
take a team. Ephemeris Dashboard, SunFlare, and Inner Orbits arrived within months,
followed by 84beings.com, a full platform for meeting the mythological beings of your
birth chart.
There is a deeper current under all of it. I met Amma — Mata Amritanandamayi —
in Seattle in the summer of 2019, and in 2024 I drove a truck on her North
American tour, one of the best things I've ever done. What I hold most
fundamental lives in the Aetherium at the center of this site's compass. The
studio's work happens in that orientation: I don't teach Truth, but my goal is to
facilitate spaces and conversations that help each individual step closer to Truth in
their own way.
The name came with the idea, in a single flash. In my own birth chart the Sun,
Jupiter, and Venus all sit in the ninth house — the house of higher knowledge,
philosophy, and the long journey toward meaning. I didn't choose the name so
much as recognize it. And everything the studio makes answers to one
principle: encounter over education. You shouldn't need to study lunar
astrology to feel the moon's rhythm, or memorize a mythology to be seen by one
of its beings. I build the stage, set the conditions, and step back. The
encounter does the rest.