In this article, Phil Nash explores how to improve the performance of a Rails application by moving long-running tasks away from the request itself and performing them in the background using Active Job. The author chooses Sidekiq as the queue backend system and demonstrates how to integrate it with Rails. By delaying API calls to Twilio with Rails, Active Job, and Sidekiq, developers can speed up their application's response times, improve user experience, and reduce stress on servers trying to respond to many users at once.