Ahead of the all-digital "GDC Summer," the Game Developers Conference polled nearly 2,500 game developers to get a sense of COVID-19's impact on the industry. In a report published today, GDC shared its findings. Despite the challenges posed by the pandemic, less than 10 percent of developers polled said they were laid off or furloughed. While one-third saw business decline, another third saw business increase. About one-third of the developers polled say their games have been delayed.

TrueVault is a HIPAA compliant API and secure data store that makes meeting the technical safeguard requirements of HIPAA easy for developers. Think of us like Stripe, but instead of payments, we make sure your app is checking all the boxes for HIPAA security and privacy.

Developer security champions are members of the development team that can translate application security into a language that the rest of the developers can understand. These champions embed application security knowledge where it's needed most: with the dev team. Simple steps can make the difference between losing your online accounts or maintaining what is now a precious commodity: Your privacy. Earlier this week, I spoke with the members of Forrester's Security & Risk Council about developer security champions programs. We discussed the key steps to building a successful program, a couple of council members shared their own experiences with creating developer security champions programs, and we engaged in a group exercise with breakout sessions (a technological and organizational ballet when you're doing all this virtually).

Once more, at The Linux Foundation's virtual Open Source Summit, VMware's Chief Open Source Officer, Dirk Hohndel, and Linux's creator, Linus Torvalds had a wide-ranging conversation about Linux development. The illustrious pair started with Hohndel asking about the large size of the recent Linux kernel 5.8 initial release. Hohndel wondered if it might have been so big because developers were staying home thanks to the coronavirus. Torvalds, who always worked at home, said, "I suspect 5.8 might be [so large] because of people staying inside but it might also be, it's just happened that several different groups ended up coming at roughly the same time, with new features in 5.8." While COVID-19 has slowed down many technologies, while speeding up other tech developments, it hasn't affected Linux development much at all.

Fitbit's acquisition of Pebble's software assets, engineers and intellectual property fits most definitions of an acquihire, or talent grab, but the success of the purchase may also depend on how the fitness wearable maker works with developers. In a blog post, Jon Barlow, Fitbit's developer advocate, outlined that Fitbit would support Pebble's software and services running through 2017. Barlow has been active with Pebble from its beginning and develops watchfaces. Barlow noted that no one wants to brick Pebble watches in the field. Meanwhile, Pebble's development tools will remain in service.