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Corey Daley

About

Corey Daley waving hello

Hi, I’m Corey Daley

I’m a staff software engineer working on cloud-native infrastructure and supply-chain security. I’ve spent 20+ years building platforms — most recently at Chainguard, before that StrongDM, and a decade-plus at Red Hat on OpenShift. This site is where I write about that work, and where I publish the small Mac apps I build on the side.

What I work on

  • Containers, Kubernetes, and the messy parts of running them at scale
  • Supply-chain security: signing, attestation, SBOMs, the whole pipeline
  • Go and Python, with a long tail of whatever the platform needs
  • Applied AI systems engineering — the operational side, not model research

The apps

Alongside the platform work, I design and ship small, focused Mac apps under my own name (some reaching to iOS too) — local-first, no ads, no tracking, no sign-ups. The idea is simple: tools that do one thing well, respect your privacy by architecture, and never try to become a subscription you forget you’re paying for.

Purrchiver

The clean Mac archive utility. An Apple-native, sandboxed, single-purpose tool: open archives, create archives, edit existing archives, and get out of the way — including the formats that usually send you hunting for sketchy freeware, like encrypted RAR and 7z. Free to download; a one-time purchase unlocks the advanced features. No ads, no subscriptions, no tricks.

Secret Store

Arbitrary small secrets — recovery codes, license keys, that one Wi-Fi password — stored in Apple’s end-to-end encrypted iCloud Keychain. Zero vendor crypto, no account, no server, no subscription: your secrets sync through infrastructure Apple already secures, and I never see them. macOS + iOS.

What I write about

The blog is where I think out loud about hard problems and what I learn building these things:

  • AI-assisted engineering — directing coding agents, multi-agent workflows, and where human judgment still has to sit
  • AI & the industry — ethics, hiring, open-source economics, and who actually pays for all this
  • Software craft — developer tools, testing, and the small sharp problems nobody else writes up
  • The apps — build notes and lessons from shipping Purrchiver, Secret Store, and whatever’s next

The platform-engineering roots show up everywhere in how I approach these, even when the post isn’t about Kubernetes.

How I work

Iteration over perfection, declarative over implicit, small focused tools over monoliths. I lean on AI as a peer collaborator throughout my workflow — drafting, critiquing, and building alongside me — but the judgment, and the shipping, stay mine.

Let’s connect