The goal? Allow developers to write mobile apps using React — a web framework — but render real native UI components instead of HTML.

If you’ve ever used Instagram, Facebook, or UberEats on your phone, you’ve directly benefited from the work of Alexey Gerasimov — even if you’ve never heard his name.

While most tech headlines go to CEOs and VCs, Gerasimov is the kind of engineer’s engineer: someone who builds the tools that change how we build everything else. Alexey Gerasimov is a Russian software engineer best known as the original creator of React Native . He started the project during his time at Facebook (now Meta) in 2013 as a hackathon experiment.