The author of the text is Alex Meyer, a developer who built an SMS restaurant ordering service using Ruby on Rails and Twilio. He encountered an issue with tracking SMS conversations in his app and found that the problem was due to CSRF protection in Rails 3, which was deleting session variables after each request from Twilio. The solution involved either changing the POST requests to GET requests or disabling CSRF protection for the specific controller handling Twilio requests by adding a line of code. By making this change, Alex was able to save and use session variables correctly, fixing the issue with his app.