Okay, I'm just going to say it — coding scared me. Like it actually made me anxious. Whenever my friends talked about it, I'd kind of zone out and think "that's not for me." I always pictured this cold, sterile world of math and logic, and I'm just... not that person. I spend most of my free time doing traditional Indian folk art. Madhubani, Warli, that whole world. So the idea of sitting in front of a screen typing out lines of code felt almost offensive to who I am, honestly.
Honestly, I don't fully know what made me try it. I think I was just bored and a little tired of telling myself I couldn't do something I'd never actually attempted. So about a month ago I opened a code editor after taking a few lessons for the first time and waited to feel lost.
I didn't, though. Not immediately. And what surprised me most was why.
HTML felt like Warli to me
A Warli piece from my own sketchbook — notice how much is communicated with so little
If you aren't familiar with Warli art, it's this incredibly stripped-down style. Usually it's just black figures on a mud-brown background. Circles, triangles, lines. But within that simplicity there's a whole visual language — a triangle is a mountain, a circle is the sun, repetition creates rhythm. It's not random at all. There's structure underneath the sparse look.
When I started writing HTML tags, something just clicked. Like, oh, this is just blocking things out. A <div> here, a <section> there. I was working on a digital birthday card project on Scrimba and I genuinely wasn't thinking "I am coding right now." I was thinking about where things should sit on the page. Where does the greeting go? What's the visual center? That's the exact same question I ask when I start a new painting and I'm figuring out my composition before I touch the brush.
HTML became the pencil sketch. The bones of the thing.
CSS is where it got weirdly personal
Some of my hand-painted Madhubani pieces — look how vibrant and colourful they can be
Madhubani is basically the opposite, though. Where Warli is minimal, Madhubani is just... everywhere. Double borders, geometric fills, intricate repeating patterns, nothing accidental. Every inch is considered. Growing up watching my relatives do it, I always thought it looked impossibly precise. It is.
CSS frustrated me in a way that felt familiar because of this, weirdly. I was trying to build a simple coffee shop menu layout and nothing was lining up. I kept fiddling. And then I thought about how I approach borders in my paintings — patient, deliberate, almost meditative. I started treating CSS Grid the same way. Not as a set of rules to memorize but as a system of deliberate placement.
I also spent way too long picking out hex codes for colors because the default ones looked too "internet" to me. Ended up using earthy, muted tones — ochres and terracottas — because they felt right. My mentor on Scrimba probably would've just gone with something standard but I couldn't. Old habits.
That's the section I felt most like myself in, I think.
JavaScript is a whole different animal
Loved making them — Loved even more seeing them run
This is where the art analogy starts to break down a little bit, I'll be honest. Because JS isn't really like adding detail to a painting. It's adding behavior. Things move. Things respond. A button doesn't just look like a button — it does something when you click it. It's just... a completely different thing. Like, the art comparison stops working here and I had to accept that.
So far I've built:
- A unit converter
- A simple Linktree-style page
- That digital birthday card I mentioned earlier
And clicking something and watching it work — something I wrote making a thing happen — that hit different. I wasn't expecting to feel that.
But I also want to be real: JavaScript broke me a few times. I'd sit with a bug for hours, completely convinced I was just not built for this. The error messages felt personal. I'd go to bed annoyed and wake up and somehow see it clearly. That cycle happened more than once. Still happens.
When it finally works though — and I mean finally, after all that — there's this specific satisfaction that I don't have a clean word for.
It's close to the feeling of finishing a massive, detailed painting after your hand's been cramping for an hour. You're tired but you don't want to stop looking at it.
Where I'm at now
I don't really have a neat conclusion for this. I'm still learning. I'm about a month in and nowhere close to calling myself a developer. But I'm not scared of it anymore, which was genuinely the thing I was least sure would change.
Comparing it to folk art helped me way more than I expected — not as a cute metaphor to explain coding to other people, but as an actual way of thinking through problems that would've otherwise felt abstract. I guess my brain needed something familiar to grab onto — turns out that was paint and patterns, not syntax guides.
I'm continuing with Scrimba's full-stack path. We'll see where it goes.
Anyway, if you're someone creative who's been avoiding code because it feels like a different species of thinking — maybe try it before you decide. You might find it speaks a language you already know. Or you might not! But at least you'll know.
And don't forget to come back here and tell me how it went. Happy Coding!!
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