Building Klau in the Open, Week 16: Trail Work and Live Loads

Week 16 of building Klau in the open.

Earth Day landed midweek and my inbox filled with "Earth Day discounts" from consumer brands. It's a strange message, buying more things in the name of the planet, and it has become the default play every April. That kind of feel-good cover over business as usual isn't who I am, and it isn't what I want built into the spirit of Klau.

I stopped work early on Wednesday and went out to do trail work instead: pruning brush and fixing erosion damage on the California coastal hills I ride most weeks. Boring, physical, and unglamorous, which is mostly the point.

I recently watched a Pacific Crest documentary called "Leave Only Footsteps" and it has stayed with me. The purist ethic is to pass through gently and change nothing, but there's something dishonest in that. The trails in that film only exist because someone keeps them there. Earth will erase far more than our footsteps if we let it. The coastal hills I work on are eroding with or without trails built by people. Keeping trails healthy and low-impact still means cutting vegetation and moving soil. Maintenance, it turns out, is what keeps them in existence.

I'm fortunate to have the flexibility and freedom to give back that way.

On the Klau side

The week mirrored the trail. I worked on onboarding and adoption for the prospects and pilots underway. From the outside that work looks like nothing, but it is where real relationships get built.

One edge case needed real attention. Live loads are jobs where a single driver stays with the work from start to finish, and Klau should hold that assignment for the whole job. Instead, the job was moving between drivers. The mistake was deep in how the dispatch logic reasons about driver continuity. It was not a surface bug.

This is the kind of week where I'm grateful for how Klau is built. It uses domain-driven design all the way down, so problems like this are easy to reason about, test, and validate. The code is clean and the fix was straightforward. It just takes time to work through the changes and get the right scenarios into the test harness. A clean architecture earns you nothing in a launch week, but it earns you a lot in a week like this one.

Dispatch Exchange also picked up a new import mapping this week, for files from another ERP with no API. That unblocks another pilot. More of the unglamorous work that moves things forward.

Still building.

Originally posted on LinkedIn on April 24, 2026.