The author, Nathaniel Okenwa, created a personalized Mother's Day gift for his mother by using WhatsApp and Cloudinary. He designed an overlay with names and used it to add photos from family members and friends to create a scrapbook. To do this, he used Twilio Serverless Function to manipulate the images, adding the overlay and text with their messages. The author also created another function to turn messages into images. Finally, he set up a conversation flow using Twilio Studio for users to send photos and messages, which were then stored in Cloudinary's media library and printed out to create the scrapbook.