{"id":2791,"date":"2009-07-31T10:15:36","date_gmt":"2009-07-31T16:15:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.johndcook.com\/blog\/?p=2791"},"modified":"2020-01-17T14:04:41","modified_gmt":"2020-01-17T20:04:41","slug":"software-that-gets-used","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.johndcook.com\/blog\/2009\/07\/31\/software-that-gets-used\/","title":{"rendered":"Software that gets used"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been looking back at software projects that I either developed or managed. I thought about which projects produced software that is actively used and which didn&#8217;t. Here&#8217;s what the popular projects had in common. The software<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>was developed to address existing needs, not speculation of future needs;<\/li>\n<li>solved a general problem; and<\/li>\n<li>was simple, often controversially simple.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>The software used most often is a numerical library. It addresses general problems, but at the same time it is specialized to our unique needs. It has some functions you won&#8217;t find in other libraries, and it lacks some functions you&#8217;d expect to see but that we haven&#8217;t needed.<\/p>\n<p>A couple of the more successful projects were re-writes of existing software that deleted maybe 90% of the original functionality. The remaining 10% was made easier to use and was tested thoroughly. No one missed the deleted functionality in one project. In the other, users requested that we add back 1% of the functionality we had deleted.<\/p>\n<h2>Related posts<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li class=\"link\"><a href=\"\/\/www.johndcook.com\/blog\/2008\/10\/15\/simple-legacy\/\">Simple legacy<\/a><\/li>\n<li class=\"link\"><a href=\"\/\/www.johndcook.com\/blog\/2008\/03\/24\/the-simplest-thing-that-might-work\/\">The simplest thing that might work<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been looking back at software projects that I either developed or managed. I thought about which projects produced software that is actively used and which didn&#8217;t. Here&#8217;s what the popular projects had in common. The software was developed to address existing needs, not speculation of future needs; solved a general problem; and was simple, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[108,127],"class_list":["post-2791","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-software-development","tag-programming","tag-simplicity"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johndcook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2791","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johndcook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johndcook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johndcook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johndcook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2791"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.johndcook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2791\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johndcook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2791"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johndcook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2791"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johndcook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2791"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}