React Native Heroes 2023, Torino

16 June 2023, Museo Nazionale dell'Automobile. The first edition of React Native Heroes — and the first Italian conference dedicated entirely to React Native. Same organisers as the Heroes family, /synesthesia events, the same car museum in Torino that would host Flutter Heroes the following February, and eleven speakers for a community that until that morning had no event of its own in Italy.

The timing was not a coincidence for me either: I was six months into a React Native app for an Italian energy provider, so I spent the day in the audience of a conference about the exact framework I was working in every morning. Badge printed developer, Deloitte, a Frecciarossa out of Milano at ten to seven in the morning, and back the same evening.

1stedition, and the first in Italy
11speakers, one track
06.49the train out of Milano
140 kmMilano to Torino, by train

The Heroes family, and where this one sits

/synesthesia events had been running developer conferences in Torino for years — droidcon Italy, then Swift Heroes, then Flutter Heroes. React Native got its turn in June 2023, and for me it was the first of four of these I would end up going to.

  1. 2023 Torino, MAUTO React Native Heroes, first edition — 16 June
  2. 2024 Torino, MAUTO Flutter Heroes, in the same building
  3. 2025 Torino, UCI Lingotto Flutter Heroes, this time in a cinema
  4. 2025 Berlin, CityCube Fluttercon + droidcon — on stage, not in the seats

Getting there

The 06.49 out of Milano Centrale, 140 km of Piemonte, and then the MAUTO on Corso Unità d'Italia, where a single cardboard sign in front of the glass doors was the only clue that the car museum had been borrowed for the day: Welcome to ReactNative Heroes — Turin & Online 2023.

A Frecciarossa train at the platform at Milano Centrale early in the morning

Milano Centrale, ten to seven

The Welcome to ReactNative Heroes Turin and Online 2023 sign outside the glass doors of the MAUTO

"Welcome to ReactNative Heroes", Turin & Online

The foyer, in purple

The whole event was branded in the React purple: cube seats with the atom logo on them, banners down the corridor, a lounge where most of the conversations of the day happened, and a table of stickers and pins to take home. And a lanyard with my own name on it — 16 June 2023 | Turin & Online — which is still in a drawer somewhere.

The lounge area of the conference with attendees sitting and talking

The lounge, where the day actually happens

The React Native Heroes badge and lanyard on a pouf, surrounded by stickers and pins

Badge, lanyard, and a pile of stickers

In the room

No cinema screen and no auditorium this time: the talks ran in one of the museum's conference rooms, on a pair of flat screens either side of a lectern still wearing the MAUTO logo, with the room in the organisers' purple t-shirts. Between sessions the screens played the conference bumper — the React atom assembling itself.

The bumper between two talks, on both screens

Can native modules be easy?

One of the more interesting talks came from Tomasz Sapeta of Software Mansion, on the Expo Modules API: writing a native module without the usual ceremony — npx create-expo-module my-module and then Swift and Kotlin on the two platforms, with the bridge described in TypeScript. The part that stuck was Records: typed and validated properties, autocompletion out of the box, default values, failing early on unexpected input, and staying in sync with the TypeScript definitions instead of drifting away from them.

The rest of the schedule went wide, as first editions do: Lorenzo Sciandra of Microsoft on the work that you don't see — the foundational changes underneath React Native and where the new architecture was heading — Federica Vacca on design systems in React Native with a Storybook approach, and a run of case studies and a round table from developers at Software Mansion, Belka, Accenture, Register.it and Synesthesia itself.

A slide about Records: typed and validated properties, autocompletion, default values

Records: typed, validated, in sync with TypeScript

Torino, and a spritz

Out at six, and then the part of a conference nobody puts in the programme: a walk across Torino past the Intesa Sanpaolo tower, Renzo Piano's glass slab on Corso Inghilterra, and an aperitivo at a table under the trees. Then the train home.

The Intesa Sanpaolo tower in Torino seen from the street

The Intesa Sanpaolo tower, on the way back

An aperitivo with a spritz and a plate of ham, with someone in the purple React Native Heroes t-shirt

Aperitivo, conference t-shirt still on

What came after

React Native Heroes came back in 2024, and the same organisers kept the Heroes machine running: I was back at the MAUTO eight months later for Flutter Heroes 2024, then at Flutter Heroes 2025 in a cinema, and in September 2025 at Fluttercon Europe and droidcon Berlin — that time on the stage rather than in the seats. This one, in a purple room in a car museum, was where that run started.

React Native Heroes 2023, Museo Nazionale dell'Automobile, Corso Unità d'Italia 40, Torino, 16 June 2023.