I built the place. I am not, by any stretch, the expert in it.
JT is the founder of The How To Network. He doesn’t run a lane — he runs the whole thing: the writers, the standard, the long game. He is also, by his own cheerful admission, no kind of tech expert — which is more or less why this edition exists. Every so often, from the Tech side, he writes from inside it anyway.
— JT
The How To Network started as a reaction. Too much of the internet is performance — hacks that don’t survive contact with a real life, advice from people who’ve never actually had to use it. I wanted the opposite. Guides written by people who’ve genuinely done the thing, in plain language, with nothing to sell you.
The Tech Edition is the one I needed most. I’m the guy who reads the setup steps twice and still gets it wrong, who’s been quietly outpaced by his own devices for years. So I hired people who aren’t — and asked them to explain it the way they’d explain it to me. If a how-to here makes sense to me, it’ll make sense to anyone.
If we can’t say it plainly, we haven’t earned the right to publish it.— JT · Founder, The How To Network
My father had a complicated relationship with technology. Rotary phones to smartphones, card catalogues to search engines, paper maps to GPS — one lifetime. He adapted to more change than any generation in history, quietly, methodically, on his own terms.
There was something he got from the figuring that he didn’t get from being shown.
Read the essay →Tech Edition
The first of more — written only when there’s something worth saying.
Let me be clear about what this isn’t. I’m not an engineer, a developer, or anyone’s idea of a power user. Nothing I write here is expert advice — the experts are the people I hired. I’m the founder. My job is the network — the writers, the standard, the long game.
But I write from the Tech side on purpose. Tech is where most of us quietly feel a little dumb and would rather not admit it — and that feeling is exactly what this edition was built to fix. Once in a while I need it fixed too.
So this page isn’t a beat or an archive. It’s just me — the founder who still texts his nephew screenshots of error messages. When something’s worth writing down, you’ll find it here.
And if something here makes you feel a little less alone in front of a glowing rectangle, I’m glad — truly. But I’ll be honest with you: figuring it out in public is mostly therapeutic for me.
If there’s a device sitting in a drawer because it beat you once — dig it out. You’re smarter than it is. You just needed someone to say so.