In 2024, I left my job to build CDviz full-time—an open source platform for CI/CD observability using CDEvents, an emerging specification with minimal ecosystem adoption. This talk shares lessons from building production tooling on early-stage standards.

You'll see: - Why I chose to build on CDEvents despite limited adoption - Technical challenges: converting diverse tool events into a unified format - Architecture decisions: PostgreSQL/TimescaleDB for storage, Grafana for visualization - Live demo: CDviz tracking deployments with real metrics - What worked, what didn't, and lessons for building on emerging specs

This is a builder's story about creating interoperability tooling before the ecosystem is ready—and why standardization matters even when adoption is slow.