In 2021, cloud computing has become essential, and developer experience is now as crucial as database internals, allowing for more tailored technology stacks. Phonetoroam leverages Ruby on Rails with a PostgreSQL database and utilizes Clerk for user management, enhancing security by not storing sensitive user data with message data and improving user experience through specialized forms. Clerk's expertise in securely managing user credentials allows phonetoroam to focus on core problems and offers domain-wide user management, enabling serverless Jamstack sites with full authentication. They refactored their Rails app to use Clerk, suggesting the removal of the User model and users table to streamline operations and improve code efficiency, advocating for high unit test coverage and integration tests to ensure a smooth transition. The refactor involves replacing user references with clerk_id and utilizing Clerk's private_metadata for user state management.