An engineer, a leader, and a lifelong student of systems.

I founded RJ McDermott, LLC to do the work I care about most: helping people build software that genuinely helps, inside organizations that are healthy enough to keep building it. In practice that means wearing several hats (executive, fractional CTO, architect, engineer, mentor, and teacher) often within the same engagement.

My path here wasn't a straight line, and that turned out to matter. I learned early to see structure, pattern, and the way independent parts resolve into a coherent whole, the same instincts I bring to systems of people and code.

The more I built and led, the clearer it became that the hardest problems were rarely just technical. They lived in the systems and incentives around the technology. Fixing the code was never enough on its own; the leverage was in the system that produced it.

That's what pulled me toward Deming, Senge, Meadows, and Schein, and toward a way of working that looks at the whole, not just the parts. Today I bring that lens to every client: diagnose the whole, find the leverage, build the capability, and leave the team stronger than I found it.