IATA Guesser is a personal tool that my traveling friends and I use to memorize the IATA code for an airport. The IATA code is defined by the eponymous organization as,
IATA Codes are an integral part of the travel industry and essential for the identification of an airline, its destinations and its traffic documents. They are also fundamental to the smooth running of hundreds of electronic applications which have been built around these coding systems for passenger and cargo traffic purposes.
I feel pretty strongly that using the IATA code to refer to a city is a sound idea. It offers conciseness when messaging or when storing information on the city on a computer (faster access, faster creation of directories to organize files), and it gives me a fun game to know them all.
An IATA code is also occasionally an interesting peek into the history or geography of a city’s airport. A favorite airport story that comes to my mind is the Newark Liberty International Airport (EWR) first brought to my attention by CGPGrey (I am a big fan of this video). Newark couldn’t use the more sensible NEW code because the US Navy sought to use the three-letter code that started ‘N’ for their purposes, and then was later given to an airport in New Orleans.
Therefore, I felt it necessary to make a game, such that I could memorize all these little nuances, which is why I made the web game. This was the first webpage created fully in HTML, CSS, and JS. I refactored the original personal Python script and wrote the bulk of it in JavaScript, naturally.
A big trouble that I encountered was understanding the algorithm to generate not already seen codes, as I initially had a recursive solution, but this caused a stack overflow error. I opted for an iterative one, since it proved not to make the client stop and stopped some very strange behavior, that made the game unplayable. This taught me about the oddities of JavaScript, and how it may vary from C++, which I have more of a background in.
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