The author of this article is Phil Nash, who shares a story about The Salvation Army in Australia reaching out for help sending SMS messages from their Jira-powered contact centre. To build a custom Jira plugin that can send SMS messages using Twilio, the author outlines the necessary steps and tools required. These include setting up an Atlassian Cloud instance, obtaining a Twilio account, installing Node.js, and creating a new project using the Twilio Serverless Toolkit. The author then describes how to create an app descriptor, build an HTML page for the plugin, and implement a function to handle form submissions. Finally, they provide instructions on deploying the plugin to Jira and discuss potential future enhancements.