The author is Jarod Reyes from Twilio, and in this video tutorial, he explains how to build SMS ETA notifications with Twilio and Ruby on Rails. The motivation behind creating these tutorials was the feedback from developers that technical documentation focused too much on isolated code snippets and not enough on end-to-end solutions suitable for production environments. To illustrate the use-case, a fake company called Laundr.io is used in this instance. The author will walk through the final product and live-code a core piece of the implementation to demonstrate how SMS ETA notifications can be implemented using Twilio and Ruby on Rails.