Contributions of indirect research toward getting a post-doc I am an engineering student, however, my graduate research is more inter-disciplinary (computational science).  Which is good for me in some ways, because one of my better skills is programming, since I've been doing it avidly as a hobby for a very long time.  Because of this, it would be much easier for me to create a widely used computational science software tool rather than a highly-cited journal article.

With the specific aim of getting a post-doc at a top-ranked university, how does creating a useful piece of software (like an original, optimized quantum monte carlo implementation for example) compare to a widely-cited journal article?  In other words, if done well, both would be highly-cited, but do frequent citations of software carry the same weight as top-tier research articles?
There's a thresholding effect for software. If you create a piece of software that has a huge number of downloads and has visible impact, that will count for something. However, with papers, you wouldn't need to have the same level of impact to have the same effect on interviewers. 

The problem really is that academics don't know how to evaluate the impact of software development, and would need help doing so. I imagine that if your potential post-doc advisor has used your software, you won't need to do much explaining. But if not, and your research credentials are otherwise weaker, it might be difficult to justify.