build without asking permission - curious engine

Date : 05-07-2026

so mimicode has a home now, and it's called Curious Engine. it's a builder non-profit out of bangalore and the whole pitch is right there in the tagline, "build without asking permission". the idea is that the best thing that ever happened to software was the internet removing the gatekeepers, and there's still this gap for early builders where you've got no validation, no funding, no community, so you just stall out. curious engine hands out money to people who are actually shipping, and they're really clear that it's not a salary and it's not a venture round, no equity, no pitch deck, no TAM slide. it's fuel. you show work, you get fuel, you keep going

i'm doing the infrastructure and web side of it. i built the site, and i set up the DNS as actual code, a source-of-truth yaml file for curiousengine.org that gets applied to the registrar, with validate/diff/backup/apply commands so nobody's ever clicking around a dashboard hoping they didn't break email. this is the ops brain i've been growing all year finally being useful for something real, treating infra like it should be versioned and reproducible instead of a pile of manual changes nobody remembers making

what gets me about this is it's the exact thing i wish existed when i was a kid on a broken laptop making obbies. nobody was going to fund a 13 year old with a weird idea, you just had to figure it out alone and hope. so being on the inside of a thing whose entire reason to exist is "here's fuel, go build, we're not going to make you beg for it" feels like closing some kind of loop. i get to be plumbing AND believer at the same time