Walmart isn’t only known for slashing prices. It’s also known for its tech division, WalmartLabs, which has developed several open-source projects, including this week’s GitHub project of the week: Electrode.

Walmart serves nearly 260 million customers who visit its 11,504 stores. Knowing that technology and software is always changing, Walmart has been ramping up its software development efforts to redefine the shopping experience on customers’ mobile devices and on the desktop. Walmart also migrated to React and Node.js, so it’s no surprise that it is open-sourcing its platform for building universal React/Node.js applications.

The Electrode Core allows developers to focus on three key elements: performance, consistency and reusability. The heart of the platform, however, is Electrode’s Archetype system, which lets developers build scalable applications that they can trust while still making sure their development and deployment is streamlined, according to its website.

The platform also lets developers power up their applications with two tools: one that enables the discovery of reusable components, and the other that allows developers to optimize their JavaScript bundles.

The Electrode Boilerplate application includes “the best technologies,” like React, Redux, React Router, CSS modules, universal rendering, Webpack, Webpack Isomorphic Loader, and Babel, which transpiles ECMAScript 6 and 7.

Electrode Boilerplate also comes with ESLint, Mocha, Enzyme, Travis CI, Gulp, Yeoman, History, Bluebird, Electrode Confippet, Electrode CSRF JWT, Electrode Redux Router Engine, Component Caching, Electrode Server, Electrify, and Electrode Docgen.

To get started, developers need to make sure they have all the environmental requirements ready beforehand. By installing Yeoman and Electrode Generator, developers can make a new directory for their app, and then generate a new project. Use a simple command to start the server, and Electrode is up and running.

Developers can get started building their apps here.

Top five projects trending on GitHub this week
#1.
WaveFunctionCollapse: Bitmap and tilemap generation from a single example with the help of ideas from quantum mechanics.

#2. Google Interview University: A complete daily plan for studying to become a Google software engineer.

#3. FreeCodeCamp: This hasn’t moved. It never will.

#4. Art of README: Learn the art of writing quality READMEs.

#5. Open NSFW model: Code for running Model and Not Suitable for Work (NSFW) classification using deep neural network Caffe models.