The author, Stuart Logan, created an app to host a Eurovision party with a sweep where attendees would be randomly assigned a country and bet on the outcome. He used web scraping techniques using Python's `requests` and `beautifulSoup` libraries to gather information about the participating countries and their corresponding Wikipedia links and Eurovision voting pages. The scraped data was then stored in a JSON file, which was uploaded to Twilio Functions as a Private Asset. A lightweight event-triggered Function was created to accept an SMS containing the number of attendees and return a random country for each person via SMS. The Function was deployed and connected to a phone number, making it available across Europe and Australia for attendees to participate in the sweep.