Just coming to say hi Paul! I recall you being very excited and getting the email after you submitted your first patch and loved it.
I think a ton of the current set of "next generation" came to Postgres a good bit later. Even Tom himself will tell you he did some stuff with images for a few years which undersells himself (tiff, jpg, png - in some form involved in creation of each of those), then found this Postgres thing and started working on it.