About

Who writes Utiliy and how the guides get made.

I’m Mike Chen. I live in Portland, Oregon, and I work on networks for a living — routing, firewalls, and the unglamorous job of making printers show up on the right VLAN.

Utiliy started in 2026 because most tutorials skip the part where things go wrong. I wanted a place for the messy version: double NAT from an ISP combo unit, a smart TV that hammers DNS at 2 a.m., and the whitelist entry that saved movie night.

What I write about

Home networking that survives real houses. Placement, channels, guest Wi-Fi, and diagrams of what is actually plugged in.

Privacy tools I run at home. Pi-hole, WireGuard, Bitwarden, Tailscale. I publish block rates, false positives, and the domains I had to allow.

Side income I’ve tested. UserTesting, freelance tech writing, and a few platforms that wasted my time. I include dollar amounts when I can.

How to read this site

If you want a sequence instead of a random article, use Start Here. If something in a guide is wrong, email me — I add a dated note at the bottom of the post when I change it.

Contact

hello@utiliy.com · Contact form

I usually reply within 48 hours.