Code in my life: A chronicle part 2

Louis Van Der Walt — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 09:41:39 +0000

This post is a continuation of part 1

During my childhood, I was obsessed with mazes. I would spend hours drawing mazes with increasingly complex rules and I would force my parents and friends to solve them. I wanted to translate this to the computer.

Every so often, I would return to the challenge. Most of my mazes were built in Minecraft. Soon though, my mind started to connect the dots. Minecraft had convinced me that computers could be bent to my will. If I could understand how the game worked, maybe I could make my own world. I was convinced understanding the .bat script was the key.

Initially, I experimented. I vividly remember trying to rename the script, after which windows would yell out a scary warning about how changing an extension might make the file unusable. I quickly pressed cancel, hoping I did not break my game.

The first time I tried opening the minecraft.bat file in notepad, I was overwhelmed. A bunch of nonsensical garbage filled my screen. I did not know it at the time, but the people who shipped the cracked version obfuscated the script. It was not meant to be understood.

I borrowed more and more books on programming and computers from the library, slowly building an understanding of how mysterious lines of text made the computer do stuff.

I attempted many times to apply my knowledge. Most of my "programming" was copying code from books in notepad, trying to run it but not having the compilers or knowledge to execute my code. My computer was littered with hundreds of little files. maze.py, maze.php, maze.java. Each an attempt to achieve my dream of creating a maze. Each time, I faced disappointment when I double-clicked, and the computer told me that the file I just worked on was unrecognised.

However, there was one piece of code I wrote that actually worked. A small little batch script - welcoming me to a new world.

echo "Hello World"

A short while later the computer I was working on died. Being locked out of a world I had only just started exploring, I had to find other ways to scratch that itch...

This post will continue in a part 3

Code in my life: A chronicle part 1

Louis Van Der Walt — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 18:51:33 +0000

Curiosity has always been part of my wiring. Before I got into computers I would take apart everything I could (most of the time irreparably).

My first ever digital device was an old Nokia phone we had in the house. It had no internet, no SIM card, just a snake game. My favourite part of it? The settings. I would sneak it into bed at night and play around in the settings at age 7... Until my dad caught me staying up one night after bedtime and took it away.

As many computer lovers, I started young. The first computer I ever used was our family computer that I played games on. It was a horribly slow computer running Windows XP. It took a whole 20 minutes to start up, and a further 10 to load into the desktop.

Around the time I turned 8, my parents got a new family machine, and the old computer became mine. Buggy, Caterpillar Construction Tycoon and Sim Copter were the staples of my childhood.

I have a fondly held memory where I wondered how someone would create a game. In my 8-year-old brain, I thought games were made by drawing every possible screen and your keyboard and mouse inputs would swap between frames in an interactive slideshow type fashion.

Around the time I turned 8, Minecraft started gaining popularity. All my friends were playing it, so I begged my parents to get it. After enough begging, they gave in and sourced a free version from a totally reputable online source and put it on my computer.

I have no idea what version of the game I had. Now I know it had to be one of the classic versions, but not sure exactly what version. All I knew is that my friends had cool features like survival mode, infinite worlds and redstone, while I had a finite world and basic features.

The version of the game I had contained 2 files. One was called minecraft_(random number)_xp.jar, and there was another file: minecraft.bat. Both on my desktop. To play the game I had to double-click the .bat file, a console would open up, it would stay blank for a good while, suddenly print a massive amount to the console, and I would be in the game.

As a kid, my mom would religiously take us to the library, and I would frustrate her with my book choice. I never went for the story books. I always darted for the non-fiction and natural sciences section. Around age 9, one of the books I took out was a full-blown Windows XP reference book. I did not fully understand what I read, but somewhere in it was a page on batch commands, and suddenly that .bat file started to make a bit of sense...

This post will continue in a part 2

DEV Community: Louis Van Der Walt

Code in my life: A chronicle part 2

Code in my life: A chronicle part 1