The author of the article, Wesley Handy, created an app that uses Twilio's SMS API and the Twitter REST API to receive notifications when a specific keyword is tweeted about. The app stores the most recent tweets in a MongoDB database and sends an SMS notification with the tweet text using Twilio's SMS API. The app engine periodically checks for new tweets by searching on the Twitter API, retrieves the first tweet that matches the search criteria, extracts its text, and sends an SMS notification to the user. If there are any statuses returned from the Twitter API, they are inserted into the MongoDB database. The app can be deployed to Heroku for real-time functionality.