One of my favorite conferences each year is Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing because of the community it brings together, its size, and its focus on students. PEARC'26 took place in Minneapolis in July, and was right in line with previous iterations. The conference celebrated its 10th year, and I marked my fifth in-person attendance, going back to the second iteration in Pittsburgh. I was thankful for the opportunity to help lead the mentorship portion of the student program this year.

The Better Scientific Software (BSSw) Fellowship program held a successful In-Conjunction-With event at PEARC during a lunch period. While I presented a dozen or so slides about the fellowship and the application process, most of the time was reserved for discussion, allowing attendees to discuss and iterate on project ideas. The BSSwF also had its poster at the Sustainable Horizons Institute booth and introduced the fellowship to many conference attendees.

While the conference had many enjoyable moments, especially interacting with old friends, some BSSw-related highlights include:

• The paper Self-Admitted Technical Debt in Scientific Software: Prioritization, Sentiment, and Propagation Across Artifacts, co-authored by Nasir Eisty (2019 BSSwF Honorable Mention and 2020 BSSw Fellow), won the best paper of the session award.
• The invited talk Community Activities to Advance Research Software by Daniel Katz (2018 BSSw Fellow).
• The new Research Software Engineering (People, Practice, and Impact) track, introduced this year and co-chaired by Ian Cosden, and Pengyin Shan, both BSSw blog contributors.
• Nitin Sukhija's talk about his workshop and BoF.

The BSSw Fellowship community looks forward to continued engagement at the PEARC'27 conference, to be held in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Further information

• Check out the PEARC website: https://pearc.acm.org.

Author bio

Adam Lavely is the BSSw Fellowship Deputy Coordinator and a User Environment Architect at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.