I'm sorry it was perceived as such. I should have been more mindful. I genuinely intended for the substantive part of the post to be about our frustrations as programmers navigating the business world. It felt like the short introductory sentence was necessary to establish context (I'll remove the link, but leave post intact so other viewers aren't confused). Still off topic but, at the time, it seemed to be an on-brand discussion for HackerNews. What we were really phishing for was rapport from other engineers that we aren't crazy. I even feel vulnerable putting our project out here, at this stage, and the quick cost-benefit analysis in my head was this was a net-neutral.

I doubt Steampipe knew we existed before this post. It seems like fate because I stumbled upon Steampipe just last week. I deliberated how to craft a not-awkward email along the lines of "Hey guys, we just realized we're tackling the same problem. Cheers." When I made the original post, I felt like it was the less awkward way of saying hi but now I'm not sure. At any rate, I hope you understand we did it in good will and not malice.

Edit: I also hope "Best of luck to Steampipe and whoever else is working on this problem" doesn't get misconstrued as being a passive aggressive jab. Our team would honestly be thrilled if all the friction points of IaaS goes away, regardless of who solves it. As a reverse-ad, I'll say a few nice things about Steampipe that stood out to me: written in Go, supports querying HackerNews, SQL/Tables are a really good medium.