The author of the text, a software engineer at Twilio, shares their experience with Unicode SMS encoding and its implications for sending international messages. They discuss the limitations of traditional ASCII character encoding in GSM networks, which can only handle 140 bytes of data, and how this affects the transmission of characters like emojis. The author then describes their project, ChesSMS, a chess game played entirely over SMS using Unicode characters, which they implemented using Erlang/OTP. They detail the challenges of rendering a chessboard on different devices with varying fonts and the creative solutions they found to overcome these issues. The text concludes with the author's positive experience with Erlang for building SMS applications on Twilio and invites readers to play ChesSMS by texting "PLAY" to a specific phone number or fork their source code on GitHub.