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Cory Trimm
2/23/2025

Building in the Open: How I’ve Contributed to the Astro Community

Screenshot of the Two Open Source Astro Themes

TL;DR

Intro

Astro first appeared on my radar at least two years ago when I decided to build Cabeça de Queijo and start to flush out repeatable processes for building & deploying sites. Astro brought a lot of benefits to the table like:

I’ve always had an interest in contributing back to various Open Source libraries. It’s even led to a few successful outreaches from recruiters are various companies. But, finding time to get up to speed with a specific repo usually took more time than fixing the bug(s) themselves. I wasn’t cutting major releases, just fixing small CSS issues, JS issues, and other small items. For this contribution to open source, I decided to rapidly create and share a couple of Astro themes that anyone can use - free of charge.

More on Why

When I took a moment to reflect back on how I got started writing code - it often involved trying to replicate a website from scratch. If I couldn’t quite understand, I would then look at the source code to better understand the various CSS being applied and then continue to integrate similar styles into my websites & applications.

I also wanted to continue on the path of how to quickly build + deploy applications out to AWS. I thought it would be a great exercise to understand what it would take to replicate a website, push to prod, and update various settings in Amazon AWS to display a URL to users. In my instance, I setup various sub-domains on my root corytrimm.com with the help of Amazon Route 53 & a distinct AWS S3 Bucket.

While poking around Astro’s Theme page, I realized that there was no good “Link In Bio” theme (at the time - now there are a few options) on the Astro Themes site. I know there is Linktree and other places to create a LIB quickly, but you don’t have total control over everything you’re displaying to users or have to pay a monthly fee.

Each of the themes below are great jumping off points for people looking to build and deploy a site quickly. You can read a bit more about each one below.

Screenshot of the Link In Bio Astro Theme

#2 Modern Company Theme (GitHub Repo)

Screenshot of the Modern Company Astro Theme

Other Benefits of OSS

While working on OSS, you get to work with folks from all over the world on a theme, library, or piece of functionality that you care about. It’s a great way to show that you give back to the community and can work nicely with a wide-variety of teams. To take it a step further from just code, I encourage you to spend some time reviewing the various discussion comments and other issues that are filed on a repository and try to help the person asking the question(s).

Future Plans for OSS Astro Contributions

Moving forward, I’m going to release a new Astro Theme every other month - kicking off in March 2025. You can view My Astro Themes page with brief highlights and info about the themes that I’ve released and am planning to release.

If you’ve used one of my themes for a project or product, drop me a note on the repository in the form of an Issue or a Discussion Comment. I’d love to see the primary site and feature you on my site.

Conclusion

While my open source journey has ebbed and flowed over my career, I do think it has brought immense benefits.

I encourage all Software Engineers to spend time getting to know their favorite libraries and contribute back to the community that we all benefit from.

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