The text discusses the author's experience building a custom video chat app using Vonage Video API and React components. The author created a portal for students of an Ada Developers Academy bootcamp to get in touch with tutors and receive real-time face-to-face help from industry mentors. They used the OpenTok React wrapper to integrate high-quality video and audio streaming into their React app, which provided customizable components that were flexible enough to embed within any of their future React apps. The author built out reusable React components for publisher, subscriber, connection status, and checkbox, demonstrating how to use these components to create a modularized and reusable video chat app. They also created a simple CSS style guide to enhance the user experience.