Baltimore Watchdog Staff Writer
Three years – and a ton of misstarts, wrong steps and “wasting his time” – separate Jal Irani, the Towson University computer science undergrad and Jal Irani, the developer of three mobile applications.
Irani, who now teaches in the Computer Science Department at Towson, refers to his apps as you would children. SleepIn is “my baby,” Irani said, explaining that the app automatically shuts down student clock alarms with school delays. Apptzr is his months-old project. And, Wavy leaf is his first proud creation, an app he worked on in his senior year at Towson.
Irani’s route to success was circuitous at best. His parents were both raised in Karachi, Pakistan and moved to America when they were in their 20s. They did not know each other until they met in Parkville. The couple, Fred and Diana Irani, settled in Perry Hall with Jal and his older sister, Jennifer. Irani attended elementary and middle schools there. When he graduated from Perry Hall High School in 2010, he attended the Community College of Baltimore County.
“I went to CCBC because, embarrassingly enough, I didn’t get accepted into any colleges or universities,” said Irani, who spent his free time working in the computer and camera sales sections of Best Buy.
“While at Best Buy, I really started diving into the hardware side of computers,” he said, “so I declared my major as Computer Science without fully knowing what that entailed or how complicated it truly was.”
After one year at CCBC, Irani transferred to his “dream school,” the University of Maryland at College Park. Things didn’t go as planned.
Irani said he never got to know his professors and never joined any clubs. He also developed a habit of over-studying useless material and wasting his time.
“I was timid in most social settings and really didn’t feel like I was myself in any capacity,” Irani said. “I may go down as one of the few people in history that did not enjoy being a student at UMD.”
In 2013, Irani transferred to Towson.
“At Towson I enjoyed all of my classes, the faculty, and my classmates,” Irani said. “I made a lot of friends on and off campus; and some of them I consider life-long friends. I received an internship within my first two months and I was spending less time worrying about school and trying to fit in and more time on personal coding projects and enjoying life outside of class.”
In 2015, during his senior year, Irani was hired by the university to work on an application with the Computer Science and the Biology departments. The app, called Wavy Leaf, is designed to map and track invasive species in the area. An invasive species is a plant, fungus, or animal species that is not native to a specific location and has the tendency to spread to a degree that could harm the environment.
Computer science Professor Josh Dehlinger taught Irani as an undergrad and worked with him in the development of Wavy Leaf.
“I taught Jal in a mobile development class during his junior year,” Dehlinger said. “That’s where he really started to gain his interest (in mobile app development).”
Dehlinger said Irani always stood out because he would seek extra work outside of the classroom.
It was at the eatery Batemans near campus in his senior year that a few drinks led to a late night discussion at a friend’s apartment. What developed was an idea for an app, called SleepIn, which was released in December 2017. SleepIn allows the user to connect the app to his or her school’s alert system and the individual’s alarm clock app. If any closures or delays occur, SleepIn will turn off the alarm of the student.
“SleepIn is my baby,” Irani said. “It launched earlier this year (December 2017) and has around 600-700 downloads now.”
“I had a proud parent moment when I downloaded SleepIn and it worked,” Dehlinger said. “He told me about the idea a year ago. It was a small idea, but he was very excited when it released.”
After graduating from Towson in May 2015, Irani worked on a Master’s Degree at Johns Hopkins University, where he studied alongside Cardiology Department officials to develop the app, Corrie Health.
“I was the lead developer for some time, but the idea came from Dr. Francoise Marvel, a cardiologist at Johns Hopkins Hospital,” Irani said. “The app is for medication adherence so heart attack patients don’t forget to take their medicines.”
When people survive major medical incidents, such as heart attacks, Irani said patients often are discharged from the hospital with only paperwork for instructions on how to properly recover and when to take their medications.
In an article on the Carrie Health website, 30-year-old heart attack survivor Sami Badra said, “I was not using my time in the hospital properly… lying around and watching a lot of TV. In the last two hours before leaving, I was given instructions but never fully understood them. I left the hospital feeling alone.”
Apple contacted Irani through LinkedIn and flew him out to their headquarters in Cupertino, California, to develop the app with a team of doctors, undergrad computer science and health majors, as well as registered nurses.
“It was a group of half engineers and half health people,” Irani said. “We worked on the app for three months over the summer of 2016, integrated it with Apple’s framework, and now it is marketed by Apple and featured on their site.”
While completing his master’s, Irani developed the application SmartAddresses and launched it in January 2017. Smart Addresses allows users to save their location and upload it to their preferred Maps application. The app also will tell you the Uber and Lyft rates from home to your saved locations.
Irani graduated from Johns Hopkins in May 2017 with a degree in computer science and was hired by Towson as an adjunct professor a month later. Dehlinger said Towson was lucky to grab him as a professor.
Nilashree Shirodkar, a junior at Towson working on a master’s in Applied Information Technology, described Irani as a “fabulously cool” professor.
“Studying with him was a great learning experience,” Shirodkar said. “He is always ready to help with anything. He helped me prepare for an interview and I always consider him a mentor.”
Shirodkar said Irani talks about SleepIn in his classes.
“I think he has done a great job by developing this application,” Shirodkar said. “It is a help for students and it feels great to see an app up and running that we have had discussions about during our classes.”
Last October, Irani started the mobile contracting company Apptzr that designs fully custom Apple and Android applications for bars, restaurants and other dining establishments. The apps are designed to help with online ordering, promotions, notifications, and even displaying events or live music.
“I saw a niche for bar and restaurant apps,” Irani said. “They want to digitize, so I come in and develop an app for their establishment and then help them solve and process everyday problems.”
Apptzr is only a couple of months old, so Irani is currently a one-man-show.
“I am currently finishing up my first client, a food truck is called the Rolling Grill,” Irani said. “The app is fully custom and the objective is to display their food truck menu, catering menu, a gallery of pictures, and a way for customers to track the truck using an interactive map.”
The map will display the trucks current location and even allow users to send the location to a GPS app of their choice. The app will also feature notifications for any promotions the truck is offering.
“As of now I work out of coffee shops,” Irani said. “One day I hope to have a spot in an incubator or co-working space where I can really grow this company.”