Technical papers
How SmartLoads stores, matches and moves a load, for people who build on it.
8 articles
Matching carrier rate confirmations to booked loads without guessing
How SmartLoads ties a carrier rate con to the right booked load: load numbers checked against dates, then lane, MC and booking state. A person still covers it.
Caching lane mileage for freight loads with a 180-day city-pair cache
Every load needs miles, and bulk imports re-read the same lanes all day. Here's how SmartLoads keeps paid distance lookups to about one in four lanes, with an undirected city-pair cache, source-provided miles, per-batch lane dedupe, and a silent cache failure that taught us what to log.
Connecting SI phone agents to a live load board
How SmartLoads' voice agents find the right load while a carrier is on the phone. One lookup webhook handles load numbers and spoken lanes, is scoped by agency and customer, returns only fields that are safe to say out loud, and turns each call into a lead tied to the right load.
Designing the SmartLoads Partner API with hashed keys, keyset cursors and atomic rate limits
How SmartLoads built a multi-tenant partner API on Supabase Edge Functions and PostgreSQL. It covers API key format and hashing, scopes that fail closed, explicit response shapes, keyset pagination, a race-free per-key rate limit in one SQL function, and serving it all from api.smartloads.io.
Fingerprint deduplication for load sheets that are re-sent all day
How SmartLoads keeps exactly one load posting per real load when shippers re-send the same emails and Google Sheets dozens of times a day. Covers fingerprint design, slot and row salts, tenant-scoped unique indexes, full-board sync with protected fields, and the mistakes that shaped it.
Parsing 16 shipper load formats with header mapping, count expansion and ditto marks
How SmartLoads reads loads from shipper emails, HTML tables, Excel sheets, PDFs, Google Sheets and TMS CSVs. It covers routing each email to the right parser, finding header rows, expanding "5 loads" lines, inheriting ditto marks, skipping hidden tabs and closed plants, and failing closed when a sheet looks wrong.
Reading scanned freight PDFs with an LLM, validation first
When a shipper's load list is a scan with no text layer, SmartLoads sends it to Claude and treats the answer as untrusted input. This paper covers when super intelligence (SI) is used, the prompt and output contract, all-or-nothing validation, holds before posting, and five lessons from real extraction bugs.
Reliable webhooks from Postgres triggers with an outbox, SKIP LOCKED and HMAC signatures
How SmartLoads sends webhooks for new carrier leads, lead-to-load matches, Cover Cards and bookings, without slowing down or ever failing the writes that trigger them. It covers trigger design, a delivery outbox, SKIP LOCKED claiming, retries, signatures, SSRF defense and Slack delivery.