This is a proposed email intro:
Hello FreeBSD,
I'm pleased to be joining the team. I've been watching my friend, and eventually my roommate, Alan L Cox work on FreeBSD and attend meetings for years, and I've been jealous. Now, with the sage counsel of Konstantin Belousov and Mark Johnston, I hope to help out. I've started by working on working on data structures and bit-twiddling hacks related to vm, but I'm happy to fine-tune code anywhere.
I have a Ph.D. in computer science, so I knew a lot about something very obscure once. I've bounced from Rice University to a startup to Cisco and back to Rice. My heroes are Bob Tarjan and Bill Gosper. As a supporter of lost causes, I favor tau over pi, continued logarithms over floating point, and libertarians. And FreeBSD over Linux.