A Surprise Benefit of Contributing to Open-Source

I used an awesome Astro theme to build this website. In the process of building this website, I discovered a few bugs and missing features in the theme. I want to contribute back to this theme since that aligns with who I want to be in the world - participating in communities and contributing to shared resources.

Each time I discover code that I want to contribute, I need to return to my fork of the theme and re-implement my code in the unaltered fork. This inadvertently tricks me into performing a more meticulous code review of the code I already committed to my website repo. On multiple occasions, I’ve discovered a cleaner or better implementation of my own code during this process.

By contributing to open source theme I inadvertently improve the code on my own website.