The author of the text is Greg Baugues, who shares a personal anecdote about turning off phone notifications for non-urgent messages. The tutorial aims to guide readers through the process of authenticating their Rails app with Google's API using OAuth and connecting it to Twilio for SMS alerts. The author explains the OAuth process in detail, highlighting its importance for accessing user data securely. They introduce Omniauth as a gem that simplifies the authentication process and provide step-by-step instructions on how to set up the necessary gems, configure Omniauth, create a Google API account, and obtain an access token. After successfully authenticating with Gmail, readers learn how to save and refresh their access tokens using a custom `Token` model. The tutorial concludes by emphasizing opportunities for integrating Google APIs with Twilio for more advanced features, such as retrieving emails from the Gmail API and sending SMS alerts.