One Year of TheSeniorTechie: What I Learned by Just Starting

A retired software developer in Asheville looks back at 360 articles, three books, and a newsletter that grew one email at a time.

Where This Whole Thing Started

A year ago I didn’t have a newsletter, a podcast, or three books with my name on them. I had a laptop and a retirement I wasn’t quite sure what to do with. My wife Joan and I live in Asheville, and between the two of us we’ve spent decades chasing the right climate, first away from Boston snow, then away from Charleston, SC heat, before landing here in 2014.

I’m Paul Wilczynski - a retired software developer - and I spent almost five decades on the inside of the technology world of that era. I ran an online Business Forum on Delphi, one of the country’s earliest online services back in the 1980s and early 90s. I owned an MCI Mail agency, selling businesses on commercial email years before most households had ever heard the word. I wasn’t reading about any of this after the fact. I was there for it.

What Actually Led to TheSeniorTechie?

In August, 2025, I found myself thinking about something that had been sitting in the back of my mind for a while: I wanted to do something that a lot of other people could actually benefit from. Not a side project or a hobby to fill hours. Something real.

Have you ever gotten to a point in life where you have time, you have skills, but you don’t quite know where to point them? That was me. I’m a senior. I understand technology from the inside out. Why not put those two things together and help people like me feel less lost, instead of more?

That’s where TheSeniorTechie came from. Even the name took some real thought. I wanted it as one word, one brand, not two separate ideas bolted together. Senior and Techie, fused into a single identity. It took a bit of digging to land on a name that felt right.

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How Much Have I Actually Published?

Over the past year, I’ve put out more than 360 posts and podcast episodes. I’ve even created a TheSeniorTechie musical anthem, and sell TheSeniorTechie merch! (Honest admission: I’m my own biggest customer. I find the personalized rocks glass particularly useful.)

These days, three articles a week get a podcast riff to go with them, a short companion piece for anyone who’d rather listen than read. That’s the current rhythm, and it feels like the right one. You can find them on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and Spotify.

Is Every Article the Same Kind of Article?

No, and that’s on purpose, even though I didn’t plan it that way from day one.

Picture a line. On one end sits “Senior.” On the other end sits “Techie.” Every article I write falls somewhere along that line, and it took me writing dozens of them before I noticed the pattern myself. A piece about managing a health condition or navigating Medicare tends to land closer to the senior end. A piece walking through how AI voice assistants actually work leans harder toward the techie end. Most weeks, I’m somewhere in the middle.

Some weeks the hardest part of writing isn’t the technology. It’s finding where the technology fits into a topic that started out being about something else entirely, like grief, or moving, or staying independent.

What Have I Actually Written and Published?

Three books live on TheSeniorTechiePress.com right now, plus a fourth coming this fall.

The odd one out is Don’t Move To Asheville: A Ruthlessly Honest Guide That Will Ruin Everywhere Else. That one has nothing to do with senior tech. I wrote it purely because I love this town and wanted to say so, loudly and a little irreverently.

The other two sit under something Amazon calls TheSeniorTechie Guides, which is really just a series grouping rather than a single book title. Those two are TheSeniorTechie Guide To AI For Seniors and Who Gets Your Passwords? TheSeniorTechie Guide To Digital Estate Planning. If you’ve ever lain awake wondering what actually happens to your accounts when you’re gone, that second one was written with you specifically in mind.

Coming this fall is On Your Own Terms: Taking Charge of Aging in Place. It’s the project I’m most excited about right now, because staying independent as you age touches nearly every reader I have.

How Did 2,300 People Find This Newsletter?

This is the part of the story that still surprises me a little. TheSeniorTechie now has more than 2,300 subscribers.

It started with OLLI, the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, a nationwide network of lifelong learning programs for adults, with a chapter right here at UNC Asheville. I’m a member myself. I sent information about TheSeniorTechie to OLLI Asheville’s mailing list, figuring a few fellow members might find it useful.

From there, I sent the same information to OLLI chapters elsewhere, and five or six of them told their own members about the newsletter too. That’s genuinely how a big chunk of this audience grew: one retired guy sending an email to people he already knew, and that email traveling further than he expected because the content was worth passing along.

Where Is All of This Going Next?

The more I do, the more I want to contribute to helping seniors, and the more I realize how much I still don’t know.

Have you ever started something small and watched it quietly turn into the thing you think about most days? That’s what’s happened here. I’ve spent a lot of time this past year connecting with people in the senior services community on LinkedIn, and I don’t just add them and move on. I actually look at what they offer, the products and services they’ve built, and the editorial content they publish, and I learn from it. When something’s worth sharing with you, I share it, and I make sure to credit the person or organization behind it.

That habit has become one of the more valuable parts of doing this work. I’m not the only person trying to make aging with technology less confusing and less lonely, and I’d rather learn from the people already doing it well than pretend I’ve figured it all out on my own.

So tell me, what’s one thing about technology that’s been quietly bugging you this year that you’d want me to write about next?