The author is creating a system to receive notifications about new beers at a local craft beer shop, Clapton Craft, using HTML parsing and Twilio SMS. The system uses a `ClaptonCraft` class to extract the latest beers from the shop's website and a `Cellar` class to store the beers in Redis. A `Rakefile` is used to define tasks for setting up the system, checking for new beers, and clearing out the database. The system can be deployed to Heroku for continuous monitoring.