Developer Spotlight: TJ Phippen

TJ is a self-taught web developer with a primary focus on PHP, SQL, and APIs. He discovered the 'view source' option in his browser at the age of 12 and was intrigued to see the code that made web pages work, no matter how rudimentary they were at the time. Twenty years and hundreds of projects later, he's still fascinated that he can build nearly anything imaginable on the web. He spends most of his time integrating various APIs. He often analyzes processes that require access to multiple systems with a steep learning curve and replaces them with a single streamlined process.

TJ previously used the Docusign eSignature API for a project that fulfilled a basic use-case, which created and sent envelopes using templates. That's all he needed at the time, but discovered many additional possibilities after diving into Laravel (dubbed the PHP Framework for Web Artisans). He discovered a plethora of user-contributed Laravel packages, but noticed there were none for Docusign. He decided to build one and contribute it to the community.

He started by developing a basic Docusign API wrapper, but then created a Laravel trait that he could assign to his document database model. This enabled him to create or update an envelope automatically when he made or changed a document with Laravel and made it available on GitHub. TJ's clients have created tens of thousands of customer and employee contracts using his Docusign API Laravel wrapper. The next update will include Docusign Connect to update an envelope's status as soon as the changes occur, and other enhancements to the model trait, and other improvements.

You can contact TJ on Twitter @tjphippen or visit his web site at http://tjphippen.com.