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content/blog/mapping-states-visited.md

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+---
+title: "Mapping the states I visited"
+date: 2024-02-01T18:30:00-05:00
+draft: false
+tags: []
+math: false
+medium_enabled: false
+---
+
+[Henrique's Impossible List](https://hacdias.com/impossible-list/) shows a list of countries that they've visited so far and their goals for the future. I personally have not travelled to many countries, but I have visited a several US states!
+
+Instead of presenting the states in a list, I thought it would be very cool to visually show it on a map. Ideally the map would be encoded in a SVG so that:
+
+- The image will scale regardless of the device size
+- I can manually edit the source to show the visited regions
+
+Now imagine my surprise after searching on [Kagi](https://kagi.com/) to come across a SVG in the public domain on [Wikipedia](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Blank_US_Map_(states_only).svg). Even better, the following is shown near the top of the file
+
+```css
+/* Individual states can be colored as follows: */
+.ks,.mt,.pa {fill:#0000FF}
+.ca,.de {fill:#FF0000}
+/* In this example, Kansas, Montana and Pennsylvania are colored blue,
+and California and Delaware are colored red.
+Place this code in the empty space below. */
+```
+
+Such an elegant way of coloring in the states! Now it's up to me to come up with some categories. As of the time of writing, I decided on:
+
+- Green: Places I've lived
+- Blue: Places I've visited
+- Darker Gray: Places I've driven through
+
+Here's how I colored by map:
+
+![Map of US States colored by whether I've visited](/files/images/usa_visited.svg)
+
+For the last couple weeks, I've been brainstorming new pages for my website and came up with https://brandonrozek.com/visited.
+
+At the time of writing, it only has the colored in states and a list of cities I've been to. Though I'm welcome to any suggestions you might have. Feel free to [get in touch!](/contact)

content/blog/python-refactoring-exceptions-context-manager.md

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+---
+title: "Quick Python: Refactoring Exceptions with Context Manager"
+date: 2024-02-01T20:48:21-05:00
+draft: false
+tags: ["Python"]
+math: false
+medium_enabled: false
+---
+
+I generally find exception syntax a little clunky...
+
+```python
+try:
+    for _ in range(5):
+        sleep(1)
+except KeyboardInterrupt:
+    # Awesome task 1
+    # Awesome task 2...
+    pass
+```
+
+Especially if you end up capturing the same exceptions and handling it the same way.
+
+```python
+try:
+    for _ in range(5):
+        sleep(1)
+except KeyboardInterrupt:
+    # Awesome task 1
+    # Awesome task 2...
+    pass
+
+try:
+    for _ in range(2):
+        sleep(1)
+except KeyboardInterrupt:
+    # Awesome task 1
+    # Awesome task 2...
+    pass
+```
+
+One way to make our code more DRY (don't-repeat-yourself) is to make use of Python's context managers.
+
+```python
+@contextmanager
+def handle_sigint():
+    try:
+        yield
+    except KeyboardInterrupt:
+        # Awesome task 1
+        # Awesome task 2...
+        pass
+```
+
+Using the context manager, everything within the indented block gets executed within the try block.
+
+```python
+with handle_sigint():
+    for _ in range(5):
+        sleep(1)
+
+with handle_sigint():
+    for _ in range(2):
+        sleep(1)
+```
+
+In fact, we can write this in a generic way to give us an alternative syntax for handling exceptions.
+
+```python
+@contextmanager
+def handle_exception(f, *exceptions):
+    try:
+        yield
+    except exceptions as e:
+        f(e)
+```
+
+For example, let's tell the user that we're explicitly ignoring their exception
+
+```python
+def ignore(e):
+    print("Ignoring", e.__class__.__name__)
+
+with handle_exception(ignore, NotImplementedError, KeyboardInterrupt):
+    for _ in range(5):
+        sleep(1)
+```
+