Getting Started on Corey Daley

A 12-Month AI/ML Roadmap for Engineers Who Feel Behind

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 18:35:00 -0400

Every senior engineer I know has a version of the same conversation with themselves: “I should really learn more about ML.” It comes up during a planning meeting when someone mentions embeddings. It comes up when a job description at an interesting company lists MLOps as a requirement. Then the sprint board calls it back.

I’ve published a 12-month AI/ML learning roadmap designed specifically for experienced software engineers — not a beginner tutorial, but a structured path from ML foundations through LLMs and generative AI, ML engineering at scale, and a capstone that turns a year of steady work into visible career leverage. The core idea: AI/ML becomes career-changing when it compounds through one sustained body of work, not when it’s consumed as scattered content.

If you’ve been sitting on the feeling that you should be doing something about this — most of the resources are free, the rest are investments worth making, and the plan is already written.

Seeing How the Sausage Gets Made: Demystifying AI and LLMs

Fri, 20 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0500

There’s a moment every developer eventually hits when they stop treating AI as a magic oracle and start asking: okay, but how does it actually work? It’s the technology equivalent of learning Santa isn’t real. A little wonder leaves the room, but something better moves in: understanding.

And understanding turns out to be a surprisingly effective antidote to the kind of fear that has people picturing Skynet every time a chatbot gives a confident answer. So let’s look inside the machine — and maybe, along the way, inside ourselves.

What do you think when you finally see how the sausage gets made?

Open Sourcing the coreydaley-dev Hugo Theme

Sat, 14 Feb 2026 17:30:20 -0500

I’m excited to announce that the Hugo theme powering this site—coreydaley-dev—is now open source! After building it collaboratively with Claude Code, I’ve released it under the MIT license so anyone can use, modify, and learn from it.

The theme offers a unique cartoony aesthetic with practical features like special date avatar swapping (think Halloween pumpkins or holiday themes), Pagefind search integration, responsive design, and full customization options. You can preview it at theme.coreydaley.dev or grab it from GitHub at coreydaley/coreydaley-dev-theme.

This wasn’t just about creating a theme—it was an experiment in AI-assisted development and a chance to give back to the Hugo community. If you’re looking for a Hugo theme that stands out from the typical minimal design while remaining fast and functional, check it out! What features would you want to see in a Hugo theme?

Welcome to My New Blog

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 22:16:10 -0500

Welcome to my new blog! I’m excited to finally have my own corner of the internet. I wanted to kick things off by sharing how I built this site and what you can expect. I chose Hugo because it’s fast, simple, and has an incredible developer experience—millisecond rebuilds and automatic browser refresh make writing feel effortless.

The github-style theme keeps things clean and content-focused. Everything’s hosted on GitHub Pages with automated deployments, so publishing is as simple as pushing to main. No servers, no databases, just pure static speed. I’ll be writing about development, AI tools, productivity workflows, and lessons from my software engineering journey.

Glad you’re here! What brought you to this blog? Are you using static site generators for your own projects?