The author, Phil, created a system to receive notifications about new beers at his local craft beer shop, Clapton Craft, using Ruby, Redis, and Twilio SMS. He built an HTML parser to extract beer information from the shop's website and stored it in a database using Redis. The system checks for new beers regularly and sends an SMS notification if any are available. The author deployed the system on Heroku and set up a scheduler to run the script every hour, allowing him to receive notifications even when his machine is turned off. This project demonstrates how to turn websites without APIs into an API that can be used to receive updates.