Dylan Shade builds technology for a God-centered future — tools that empower purposeful living, not addiction.
I’m a software engineer and composer in Louisville. I want the things I make to help someone live on purpose: a chord under the fingers, a passage of scripture you can actually find, software that does not ask for your attention back.
I currently work as an applied AI engineer at Papa Johns. Before that I was a software engineer at Forward Research and at JPMorgan Chase, where the work included an AWS migration, LLM-powered systems, and two hackathon championships. Earlier on I interned at Stantec, CSI, and OpenText.
Canon is the chord composer I keep shipping, for iOS, Mac, and Windows. With Chord Solver, Vivace Theory, and the other apps, that work has reached more than 25,000 people. I studied computer science at the University of Kentucky, with a minor in music, and I’m an AWS Cloud Practitioner.
The other half is the music: albums and singles, eight published choral and orchestral works, and sound for the film Crossing Over.