Kartikey Agarwal — I build practical tools, mostly on weekends.
Software by trade. Maker by habit. This page collects nine side projects from the last three years — desktop tools for shops and traders, a live bullion-rate portal, collaborative travel planners, and one weekend web hack — built mostly on Sundays, mostly for myself.
Nine things I built for fun, between 2023 and now.
None of these were commissioned. Most were finished on Sundays. The order leads with the most representative work — practical tools for shops and traders — and trails into travel planners and weekend hacks.
Estimation tool for silver shops — itemised weight + wage maths, AES-256 encrypted SQLite, Argon2 keyring, print-ready INR layouts.
Billing app for jewellery showrooms — composes sales invoices and posts them straight into TallyPrime over the XML API. Keyboard-first, no mouse needed.
Payroll manager for small businesses. Tracks employees, attendance and advances, generates payslip PDFs and Excel registers, exports ICICI bulk-payment files.
Inventory + daily-sales recorder for small shops. Local-first SQLite, keyboard-driven desktop UX, Windows / Android / iOS / Linux / macOS.
Low-lag live bullion rate portal for a Delhi silver bazaar. Streams the day's mandi rate to a clean public page with no login and no clutter.
Indian-market portfolio tracker. Live Yahoo Finance prices, P/L analytics, capital-gains tax reports (STCG / LTCG), CSV export.
Collaborative trip planner for a 11-day Osaka → Kyoto → Tokyo run. Live cost calc, shared notes, real-time itinerary editing for the whole group.
Same idea, different trip — Prague + Budapest, ten nights. Detailed day-by-day plans, transport modal, expense splitter.
Quick-launch pre-written Google reviews for friends running small businesses. One click, one tab, one review.
What I'm doing this month.
- Hardening Salary Manager — payslip templates, ICICI export edge cases
- Polishing DDA Billing's Tally bridge — retries, cleaner error surfacing
- Sketching a follow-up to Silver Estimate — multi-shop sync
- Picking up Rust on weekends, slowly
- Reading Designing Data-Intensive Applications, also slowly
A short note about me.
I'm a software engineer in New Delhi who builds practical tools for real users — small shops, traders, travelers — not just demos. Most of my work is end-to-end: design, local-first storage, encryption where it matters, and packaging into something a non-technical person can install on day one.
I move comfortably between Python, Flutter, React, and C# — picking the stack that fits the deployment, not the other way around. I like small interfaces, slow software, and the kind of websites that load in one second and never ask you to log in.
If any of that sounds familiar, I'd love to hear from you.