The 987.2 Porsche Boxster is one of the best values in the used sports car market today. There is so much to love about the vehicle, but the OEM headunit is not one of them. It's very dated, clunky, and doesn't support CarPlay (!), so one of the first things I did after picking up my car was purchase and install a new headunit. I selected the Sony XAV-AX1000 headunit because: It's one of the only aftermarket headunits with a physical volume knob The matte black plastic finish very closely matches my Porsche's interior I didn't need wireless CarPlay It's relatively cheap I also picked up this dash kit from Crutchfield as well to have the install look as factory as possible. I will say that the fit is very tight (it's a friction fit) so triple check wiring before sliding this into the dash. If you do happen to get the kit stuck with the headunit in it, I've had luck freeing it with the help of a metal putty knife. My 987.2 has the Sound Package Plus (SPP), which is the middle tier between the basic speakers and the Bose speakers (which are much more difficult to connect). The connector I needed as a result was the Metra 70-9003 harness. The connector may come with a fuse tap, but I opted to just use a separately purcahsed unit that fit well in the fuse box without needing to drill any holes. Note that the Metra 70-9003 harness may not work with the base package. Other supplies needed: Electrical tape Assorted t-taps Assorted spade connectors Low-profile fuse tap Metra 70-1787 harness (seperate from the Metra 70-9003 harness, this is just a donor for the RCA cables) Stranded red wire (used to connect power from fuse tap to headunit) Banana plug adapter for connecing SiriusXM Tools needed: Heat gun/heat shrink Screwdriver set Soldering iron/solder Wire strippers Scissors Also of note that my Porsche did not come equipped with steering wheel controls. If you vehicle does have steering wheel controls, you may need to purchase extra materials in order to get those to work, if so desired. The first thing I did was assemble the headunit inside of the dash kit and set it aside on my desk. The screws that come with the dash kit don't work great but seem to be able to self-tap into the headunit. Just sure you screw them in flush, otherwise the unit won't fit in the vehicle. Next, it's time to wire the Metra harness. You can view Crutchfield's wiring diagram here. Next, you can splice the donor RCA cables from the 70-1787 harness with the speaker wires in the 70-9003 harness. Using your wire strippers, remove the outer layer of shielding from the RCA cables, exposing the positive wire and the stranded negative wire. Twist the stranded wire together and put the heat shrink tube over the cable. Solder the positive wire to the 70-9003 harness positive wire and solder the negative wire to the 70-9003 negative wire for the same speaker. Wrap each connection tightly with electrical tape, slide the heat shrink over the connections, and use your heat gun to set. Repeat this for the three other pairs of speakers. Moving on to the install, removal of the headunit in the 987.2 is straightfoward, only requiring the removal of a few screws. This YouTube video explains it well. I reccommend disconnecting your battery first if possible, as you should do whenever working with your car's electrical system. Be delicate as the OEM headunit is still valuable and you may want to swap it back before selling your vehicle. You can now remove the trim around the fuse compartment and tap the fuse; I used C6 as it turns on and off with the ignition. Crimp a length of the stranded red wire to the tapped fuse connector and snake it through to the headunit area. I had the wire rest on the trim below the steering wheel and it hasn't caused any issues. Re-attach the fusebox surrounding trim and use a spade connector to attach the fuse tap wire to the power input for the headunit. I wrapped the connection with electrical tape to prevent shorts. At this point you may want to tap the parking lights in order to control automatic dimming of the headunit. I did not do that during my install, so you'll need to look at a diagram to see what color to look out for. I will note, however, that you are able to easily manually dim the display in the settings. Now, plug the RCA connectors into the respective pre-amp outputs on the headunit to connect the speakers. When you disconnected the original factory headunit, there was a twelve-pin blue connector. The pink wire with the red stripe powers the vehicle's amplifier (under passenger seat in SPP-equipped vehicles). I used the "Remote Out" wire in the new headunit to power both the amp as well as the powered AM/FM radio antenna. Use t-taps to connect both the red and white striped wire and the powered antenna wire (thicker, solid blue wire in the main harness). At this point you can also connect the SiriusXM adapter if your vehicle is equipped. Finally, after you've checked all of your connections you can (carefully!) slide your headunit into place, reconnect the battery, and test it out! If you are noticing a fair amount of feedback, you can optionally add an inline ground loop isolator between the pre-amp output and your harness to reduce some of the interference. Enjoy your new radio and feel free to email me and I can try and answer any questions you may have. Please note I am not an expert at this and am not responsible for the safety of yourself or and damage to your vehicle, the headunit, etc.

So you've set out to create a new portfolio for yourself. You start gathering inspiration from platforms like Godly and Minimal Gallery, draw some rectangles in Figma, and open your text editor. You pause. There's thousands of ways to build your website, how do you decide which to go with? You want your website to be beautiful for the users, but you also want to be able to quickly add new posts and case studies. You decide you want to have a dynamic website (good choice!), but the dozens of CMS options weigh on you. Do you pick headless or full-stack? What if you just make a theme? So many choices. I was faced with the same dilemma a few months ago. I finally had the motivation to create a new personal website, but wasn't sure where to start. I decided to keep things simple, I'd write it with a library I knew very well: React. That only solved half of the equation, however. When it came time to decide how to power the dynamic content on the site, I knew I wanted it to be free, easy to use, and open source. A static site powered by Next.js and markdown was the obvious choice. View the source on GitHub. To get started on creating your portfolio, run the following commands. I'm using pnpm, but feel free to use yarn or npm! pnpm dlx create-next-app@latest --typescript cd into your new project and run the following commands to install the necessary packages and bootstrap Tailwind: pnpm install dayjs pnpm install gray-matter react-markdown tailwindcss postcss autoprefixer -D pnpm dlx tailwindcss init -p That's a lot of packages. Let's break them down... gray-matter will be used to parse "front-matter" from our markdown files (we'll read more about this later!) react-markdown is a React component to render markdown content tailwindcss postcss autoprefixer are requirements for installing Tailwind for Next.js Phew! Let's continue our setup by finishing the Tailwind install... Add the following to the module.exports in the generated tailwind.config.js file: content: [ "./pages/**/*.{js,ts,jsx,tsx}", "./components/**/*.{js,ts,jsx,tsx}", "./layouts/**/*.{js,ts,jsx,tsx}", "./utils/**/*.{js,ts,jsx,tsx}" ], To bring the styles into your project, add the following to the styles/globals.css file: @tailwind base; @tailwind components; @tailwind utilities; Great! Finally, let's create our new directories by running the following in the root: mkdir _projects mkdir public/projects mkdir layouts mkdir components mkdir utils We're finally ready to start coding! To get started, create a new layout file, ProjectCard.tsx in the components directory. This component will be displayed for each project on the home page's grid. In components/ProjectCard.tsx add: import React from "react"; import Image from "next/image"; import Link from "next/link"; const ProjectCard = ({ title, description, slug, photo, }: { title: string; description: string; slug: string; photo: string; }) => ( <Link href={`/project/${slug}`}> <div className="flex-1 flex flex-col gap-2"> <Image src={photo} alt={title} width="0" height="0" sizes="100vw" className="w-full h-full aspect-square object-cover" priority /> <h3 className="text-black font-bold text-xs">{title}</h3> <p className="text-gray-500 text-xs">{description}</p> </div> </Link> ); export default ProjectCard; Now we need a place to display all of our project cards. Create a new layout called Grid.tsx in the layouts directory. In layouts/Grid.tsx, add the following: import React from "react"; import ProjectCard from "../components/ProjectCard"; import type { Project } from "../layouts/Project"; const Grid = ({ projects }: { projects: Project[] }) => ( <div className="flex flex-col gap-12 max-w-screen-md mx-auto"> <h2 className="text-black font-bold text-lg">Projects</h2> <div className="grid grid-cols-2 md:grid-cols-4 gap-8"> {projects.map(({ meta }) => ( <ProjectCard key={meta.slug} title={meta.title} description={meta.description} slug={meta.slug} photo={meta.photo} /> ))} </div> </div> ); export default Grid; Let's add a demo project now! In the _projects at your root, create a new file. The name doesn't matter, but I find it helpful to make it the same as the URL slug. In that file, add soemthing similar to the following: --- title: Example Project slug: example-project date: February 1, 2023 description: Just an example project! photo: /projects/example-project.jpg --- Something about Example Project... The area between the ---'s is called "front-matter", and it's what we brought gray-matter in to parse for us. Everything under the second seperator is the content of the case study. It can be any valid markdown. Save the file and let's move on to tying things together! In your pages/index.tsx file that Next.js generated, replace the content with the following. Feel free to ignore the missing Project type for now. We'll add that soon! import React from "react"; import path from "path"; import { promises as fs } from "fs"; import matter from "gray-matter"; import dayjs from "dayjs"; import Grid from "../layouts/Grid"; import type { Project } from "../layouts/Project"; const PROJECTS_DIR = "_projects"; export async function getStaticProps() { const projectsDir = path.join(process.cwd(), PROJECTS_DIR); const files = await fs.readdir(projectsDir); const postPaths = files.filter((file) => { const ext = path.extname(file); return ext === ".md"; }); const projects = await Promise.all( postPaths.map(async (file: string) => { const contents = await fs.readFile(path.join(projectsDir, file), "utf8"); const parsed = matter(contents); const project = { content: parsed.content, meta: parsed.data, }; return project; }) ); const sortedProjects = projects.sort((a, b) => dayjs(a.meta.date).isAfter(dayjs(b.meta.date)) ? -1 : 1 ); return { props: { projects: sortedProjects, }, }; } export default function Home({ projects }: { projects: Project[] }) { return ( <main className="mx-10 sm:mx-0 my-10"> <Grid projects={projects} /> </main> ); } This may look a little confusing if you've never seen getStaticProps before, but you can read more about it in the Next.js docs. All it's doing here is getting an array of Projects that we then use dayjs to sort from a human-readable date in the metadata and pass that array as a prop to our Grid. Now just run pnpm dev and you should see your project on the home page! Feel free to add more projects and see how it sorts by date and adds them to the grid. Now, if you try and click on a project, you'll notice it takes you to a 404 page. Let's go ahead and add a single project layout by creating a file called Project.tsx in layouts. In Project.tsx, add the following: import React from "react"; import Image from "next/image"; export type ProjectMeta = { title: string; description: string; slug: string; date: string; photo: string; }; export type Project = { meta: ProjectMeta; content: string; }; const Project = ({ project, renderedProjectContent, }: { project: Project; renderedProjectContent: string; }) => ( <div className="flex flex-col gap-8 max-w-screen-md mx-auto"> <h2 className="text-black font-bold text-lg">{project.meta.title}</h2> <h3 className="text-gray-500 text-base">{project.meta.description}</h3> <Image src={project.meta.photo} alt={project.meta.title} width="0" height="0" sizes="100vw" className="w-full h-full" priority /> <div className="flex flex-col gap-8" dangerouslySetInnerHTML={{ __html: renderedProjectContent }} /> </div> ); export default Project; ⚠️ Note the dangerouslySetInnerHTML. It's ok to use here as the only user's content that will be rendered there is your's. This is not a great practice, however, and you should not do this on a platform that other's are able to post content to. In the next step, we are going to be writing a utility to generate that HTML. To do so, create a new file called markdown.tsx in the utils directory and add the following: import React from "react"; import Link from "next/link"; import * as ReactDOMServer from "react-dom/server"; import ReactMarkdown from "react-markdown"; const Img = ({ ...props }: any) => ( <img className="rounded-[8px] max-w-screen-lg mx-auto w-full" {...props} /> ); const Text = ({ children, node }: { children: React.ReactNode; node: any }) => { if (node.children[0].tagName === "img") { const image: any = node.children[0]; return <Img src={image.properties.src} />; } return ( <p className="flex-1 flex-grow w-full text-xs leading-6 max-w-screen-md mx-auto"> {children} </p> ); }; const Anchor = ({ children, href }: any) => ( <Link href={href} className="inline underline"> {children} </Link> ); export const renderMarkdownToHTML = (markup: string) => { return ReactDOMServer.renderToStaticMarkup( <ReactMarkdown components={{ p: Text, img: Img, a: Anchor, }} > {markup.trim()!} </ReactMarkdown> ); }; This component uses react-markdown to enable us to define JSX component mappings for markdown elements! Feel free to get creative here and expand upon what's already in there. So far so good! We're getting close. Now we just need to create a new file called [slug].tsx in pages/project that will pull that new component in. In [slug.tsx], add the following: import React from "react"; import { promises as fs } from "fs"; import path from "path"; import matter from "gray-matter"; import ProjectLayout from "../../layouts/Project"; import { renderMarkdownToHTML } from "../../utils/markdown"; import type { Project } from "../../layouts/Project"; const PROJECTS_DIR = "_projects"; export async function getStaticProps({ params }: { params: { slug: string } }) { const projectsDir = path.join(process.cwd(), PROJECTS_DIR); const files = await fs.readdir(projectsDir); const projectPaths = files.filter((file) => { const ext = path.extname(file); return ext === ".md"; }); const projects = await Promise.all( projectPaths.map(async (file: string) => { const contents = await fs.readFile(path.join(projectsDir, file), "utf8"); const parsed = matter(contents); return { content: parsed.content, meta: parsed.data, }; }) ); const project = projects.find((p) => p?.meta?.slug === params.slug); const renderedProjectContent = renderMarkdownToHTML(project?.content!); return { props: { project, renderedProjectContent, }, }; } export async function getStaticPaths() { const projectsDir = path.join(process.cwd(), PROJECTS_DIR); const files = await fs.readdir(projectsDir); const projectPaths = files.filter((file) => { const ext = path.extname(file); return ext === ".md"; }); const projects = await Promise.all( projectPaths.map(async (file: string) => { const contents = await fs.readFile(path.join(projectsDir, file), "utf8"); const parsed = matter(contents); return { content: parsed.content, meta: parsed.data, }; }) ); const paths = projects.map((project) => ({ params: { slug: project?.meta?.slug }, })); return { paths, fallback: false, }; } const Project = ({ project, renderedProjectContent, }: { project: Project; renderedProjectContent: string; }) => ( <main className="mx-10 sm:mx-0 my-10"> <ProjectLayout project={project} renderedProjectContent={renderedProjectContent} /> </main> ); export default Project; Similar to the index.tsx page, we are grabbing the list of projects again, however this time we are filtering to find the single project whose slug matches that in the dynamic page's URL. Then, we are defining a function called getStaticPaths that is another special Next.js feature to dynamically create the static paths for generated content (in this case, our Projects!). You can read more about that in the Next.js docs. Great! If you go back to the home page and click a project, you should now see it takes you to a single project page! That's really all you need to get started! You now have a simple markdown-powered portfolio. You can use this as a jumping-off point to continue building out the (easy-to-update) portfolio of your dreams! Here's some ideas to get you started: Use next-sitemap to generate a sitemap to all of your dynamic routes to make it easier for search engines to index your site As you probably noted, some of the code we wrote isn't very DRY; maybe extract some of the repeated code into more utils Add a navbar and footer Add more pages to tell visitors about yourself or how to get in touch with you Looking foward to see what y'all create! View the source on GitHub.