My background cuts across federal service, real estate, software, research, education, and international travel. This site exists mostly to give a more accurate read on who I am than a profile, a post, or a single conversation ever could.
I graduated in 2013 with a double major in Political Science (public policy) and Sociology (criminology). At the time, law school looked like the likely next step. Life intervened. I needed to work, so I joined the federal government in 2014 instead. While working full time, I earned my MBA in the evenings and finished in 2017.
While living in Seattle, I bought my first house, ran the numbers, realized ownership made more sense than rent, and used a Washington first-time buyer program to make it happen before I had even finished the MBA. I renovated it myself, got promoted, sold it later, and moved back closer to family. That started a real interest in property, renovation, and the economics around them that never really left.
Needing additional income, I taught myself software on the side: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Ruby, Python, mostly by building, breaking, and rebuilding. That widened into AI early, long before the current wave made it unavoidable, and eventually into contract work and private builds. I left my role as an adjudicator in the federal government in 2022 after a rewarding and heavily awarded run, but not one I wanted to keep living indefinitely.
Along the way there was also a travel agency I mostly use for personal and family planning, an NGO focused on education access, professional real estate work, independent research, and a few years of international travel without a permanent base. The through-line is not just that I have too many tabs open. It is that I keep ending up at the intersection of systems, incentives, institutions, and the lived reality underneath them.
A lot of the work that shaped me most is difficult to display directly. Some of it was internal, some sensitive, some covered by NDA, and some simply unfinished. So this site is less a portfolio than a public map. If you found me through social media, you may know one particularly chaotic chapter already. The last 6 years have just been chapters like that!
Find me around the internet →These are the main areas I keep returning to. Not because they look tidy together on paper, but because they are where my attention genuinely lives.
This is the intellectual center of gravity. Political science, economics, institutional behavior, and the gap between official explanation and lived reality. A lot of my research starts with a simple question and ends somewhere much bigger than expected.
Real estate pulled me in through lived experience first, then professional work. Housing, renovation, ownership, risk, incentives, and the gap between what property looks like on paper and what it feels like in real life all live here.
I came to software the same way I come to most things: by needing something done and not having a clean path to outsource it. I am self-taught, technically curious, and most interested in building things that make an idea or workflow more usable.
Most days still involve keeping up with domestic and international events, then digging below the headlines into the structures underneath them. Public education remains something I enjoy when I can make the time for it.
Mostly non-fiction, with fiction filling the gaps when I need to leave the real world. Although given my love of cyberpunk, it's often just leaving dystopia for dystopia.
A major property and legal mess in Illinois has consumed more time, attention, and money than I would have chosen. It has also forced a lot of learning the hard way. One day I will probably write the full version.
Arizona after Illinois. Leaving the Pacific Northwest for good. It was a great place to grow up. This next move feels less like escape than a reset with a little more room to think clearly and build again.
Several years of international travel changed more than my location. It changed my sense of scale. Places stop being abstractions once you have moved through them long enough to notice how people live, what institutions feel like on the ground, and how different assumptions look outside the country that taught them to you. Most of this happened without a permanent base and while juggling everything else on this page. Not glamorous. Still deeply formative.
View the Map →
I do read what people send. Research, writing, real estate, travel planning, collaboration ideas, or just a conversation worth having — email is usually the cleanest route.
For anything substantive — research, writing, real estate, travel agency inquiries, or collaboration — email is the right move. I am slower some weeks than others, but I do make my way through it.
findtrev@outlook.com →