: When building a system, focus on the hardest communication problem first. 2. Open source isn’t just code — it’s community Alexey handed off React Native to Facebook’s core team, but his initial release set the tone: clear docs, a simple getting-started experience, and early plugins.
Next time you use an app that feels fast, fluid, and cross-platform, there’s a decent chance it owes something to a quiet Russian engineer and his hackathon project. Share it with a mobile developer friend — or anyone who’s ever wondered who actually creates the tools we use every day.
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.
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.