Derek Collison gave a presentation on Cloud Foundry and why Ruby was chosen as the programming language. Cloud Foundry is an open platform as a service (PaaS) that allows applications to be deployed and scaled across clouds. It uses Ruby due to its expressiveness, productivity, and ability to implement asynchronous patterns required for a distributed system. However, Ruby's performance and packaging could be improved. While Ruby was a good choice, its future depends on how well it can power mobile, data-centric and distributed applications.