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Uber released as open source Piranha, the tool that used to remove deprecated code in your apps

Uber is a company known worldwide for its service of transport vehicles with driver many controversial legislative has generated (and continues to generate) in the last few years. But there is another facet of Uber’s less well-known: the developer of open source software.

The past month of January, for example, the company released Manifold, a tool that allows you to debug models of machine learning in a visual way, which greatly facilitates the task of diagnosing the causes of performance problems of the algorithms of AI.

Uber was using this tool at the domestic level to analyse models of IAintegrated in its platform Michelangelo ML; what they did, after receiving feedback from developers that they valued the utility that would have on projects overall purpose, was create a stand-alone version, coupled to the platform… and upload your code to Github.

In the words of Lezhi Li, software engineer, machine learning of Uber,

“By releasing this stand-alone version and open source tool, we believe that will benefit the community of machine learning to provide interpretability and debugging of workflows”.

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Piranha, the newest addition to the Github Uber

Now, two months later, Uber has released another development tool, and has become equally open-source. His name is Piranha, and its mission is to detect and remove automatically the code of the unnecessary functionality of an application.

Let’s explain this in a simple way: the ‘feature flags’ are functionalities that are incorporated into the application in such a way that it can be activated and deactivated without changing the code of the same. So, when it decides to dispense with any of them, his ‘off switch’ is easy… but it also means that the code of the applications can end up accumulating ‘feature flags’ discarded that increase the complexity of the code and make it difficult to work with the same.

Piranha identifies, in this way, these irrelevant characteristics, and to facilitate the removal of the code linked to the same: Uber had been using in the process of developing their applications for Android and iOS but now it is the new addition the repository of Uber on Github.

“Currently it is implemented for programming in Objective-C, Swift and Java, but now it may be that the open source community want to be able to apply Piranha to other languages, or improve your ability to refactor code, or…”.

What came before the Manifold and Piranha?

Before that, in 2019, Uber released two other development tools software: Dish (which allows you to build, train and deploy an agent AI conversational) and Ludwig (a ‘toolbox’ of deep learning, built on TensorFlow, and that allows users to train and to put to proof models of deep learning without having to write code). 2017 dating as far back as other similar projects of the company, as the language Pyror and the tool Horovod.