Every day (even weekends), I work on Free Software (seriously, it's so bad my wife writes a comic about it). It just so happens that during the week, I get paid to work on Free Software, which is an absolute dream for me.
Launchpad
Launchpad is many things. Really. I bet you can find 10 people at UDS that each do entirely separate and different things on Launchpad. Launchpad is project headquarters and code hosting and bug tracking and packaging and translating and code reviewing and feature planning and question answering. In some cases, it's many of those things all at the same time.
I heart Launchpad. Specifically, I heart the part of Launchpad that allows you to put code on Launchpad, and review code on Launchpad, and get code from Launchpad. Shoot, I just spent the last few months making sure that you could take the code you (or anyone) put on Launchpad and make a package out of it and then people could download and install on their computers. I heart that part too!
I think about Launchpad a lot. I think about the people that use Launchpad and how I can keep them happy (like MySQL, Drizzle, OpenStack). I think about the people that I want to use Launchpad, and how I can make them happy. I think about how Launchpad could be better. I spend lots of time discussing and implementing ways to do all of these things.
A large part of my time gets spent working on Launchpad, but it doesn't stop there. A large part of my life gets spent on Launchpad. When people tell me Launchpad sucks, I cry a little. When people tell me Launchpad is awesome, I pee a little (figuratively). Sure, it's a job, but it's also a labor of love. I contribute more than code to Launchpad. I contribute my heart to it as well.
lazr-js
Did you know that Canonical has standardized its javascript company-wide to use the YUI 3 javascript library? Did you know that Canonical stores all their shared javascript code out in the open, with an AGPLv3 license that anyone can use? That code can be found in the lazr-js project, a collection of YUI 3 javascript widgets that you can consistently see throughout the Canonical web projects.
Most recently, I've taken lazr-js under my wing. I want people to use it outside of Canonical. There's some really great stuff in lp:lazr-js that I think many people can benefit from. As the various web projects at Canonical create interactive experiences, you can harness that knowledge by using the lazr-js library.
Tarmac
Remember how I heart Launchpad? I also heart Bazaar, and I heart the workflows that these tools give me. You know what I don't like? Doing simple things that can be replaced with scripts. Tarmac does some of those things for me.
Tarmac is designed as a Launchpad specific alternative to PQM. The basic idea is that after a code review has been completed, users shouldn't have to do boring things like handling merges into trunk. Tarmac handles that for you. In fact, Tarmac can be taught about your code's tests, or your team's review rules, or anything else you want to teach it (hopefully), and it'll make sure that you have a pristine branch that always works. That way, you can busy yourself with writing code and reviewing code, and not worry too much about how that code gets into trunk.
Tarmac is another of those "labors of love" for me. I wrote it soon after I joined Canonical, fully expecting someone much more brilliant than I to come along and do it better. What really happened was something I never expected. People started sending me patches to make Tarmac better. People filed bugs with issues they had, and features they wanted to see. It soon grew to be a legit project (which, as I've mentioned before, was a complete accident).
Culture
NOTE: This section was written after I read Mark's post in a similar vein.
To me, my most important contribution to the Free Software projects I work on is the culture I've come to take as the status quo at Canonical. We test our code. We strive for quality. We help each other. We then, in turn, go to our projects outside of Canonical and try our best to be good citizens there.
When I started at Canonical, there were many Free Software projects that I contributed too. One of these projects was Entertainer. I hope the former developers of Entertainer won't mind if I use them as an example, but I'm going to anyway. When I started at Canonical, many people there had a clear mind on how to maintain quality in a software project. It was amazing! I assimilated. I tried to think of a better word, but "assimilated" is the best one. The Church of Canonical had a Gospel, and I drank the Kool-Aid. I took this new purple-flavored drink to Entertainer, and imposed the same guidelines there as I was using at work. It was amazing to see what happened. I found that our development processes were better, that our work was better coordinated, and that we had quality in our software (that is, until all the Entertainer developers ran out of time to work on Entertainer).