On Balancing a Versatile Freelance Career: Meet the Writer Grant Bartel

So let’s start! Tell us a bit about yourself. For example, name, profession, and personal interests.

I’m Grant and I freelance as a quant, dev, and writer. It sounds like a crazy mix and I’d have to agree! I started out my career as an engineer and steadily moved more toward tech and finance. And somewhere how along the way I discovered a passion for writing, so here I am. At the moment, I mostly work with hedge funds, family offices, and fintech companies.

Personal interest? Reading, eating, traveling, exercising, and watching 90s movies. For sure.

Interesting! What was your latest Hackernoon Top story about?

I wrote about how Bitcoin and gold have been in an ongoing war. I first wanted to highlight how they’re both similar then dive into their key differences. That was the qualitative part, but I really wanted to laser in on the quantitative part. So I presented the case for Bitcoin as a superior version of gold through the use of various analytics, scenarios, and price estimates. So essentially lots of charts, numbers, and speculation 😉

If you haven’t read it yet, check it out 👉 Bitcoin vs. Gold: Background, Analytics, and Price Estimates

Do you usually write on similar topics? If not, what do you usually write about?

Well I used to write about anything and everything when I started freelance writing! Home decor, archery, sailing, eco-friendly living, Pomeranians. But that was before I honed in on my niche (fintech) and learned to charge a lot more. Some of my clients in the fintech space include Binance, MetaQuotes, DTransfer, and Paystand.

When I write for myself, I like to write about crypto with a quant’s perspective and some code to share. And sometimes I just write out my thoughts in a Google Doc to put them in order so I can plan, strategize, whatever.

Great! What is your usual writing routine like (if you have one?)

I do my best writing in the morning, I write most days of the week, and it usually lasts around 1-3 hours.

Being a writer in tech can be a challenge. It’s not often our main role, but an addition to another one. What is the biggest challenge you have when it comes to writing?

My biggest challenge is trying to avoid editing as I'm writing. I sometimes find myself overthinking/optimizing as I write when instead I should just get it all out of my head then edit it later. I think it’s similar to coding or analyzing data. You just need to get it to work or make sense then you can go back and do a code cleanup or organize the data/presentation in a more intuitive way.

What is the next thing you hope to achieve in your career?

Honestly, I’m pretty happy where I’m at right now. I’ve been working for myself since 2018 and each year’s only gotten better. If I were to change that, the opportunity would have to be an awesome one. Probably working for a crypto fund doing some sort of analyst work that combines my quant/coding/writing skills.

Wow, that’s admirable. Now, something more casual: What is your guilty pleasure of choice?

I’m an “ex-smoker”, so the occasional cigarette for sure!

Do you have a non-tech-related hobby? If yes, what is it?

I’ve been on an Isaac Asimov reading rampage and I’m almost done with his entire robot, empire, and foundation series AND his memoirs. That’s my main activity right now, but I also like cooking and trying out new places to eat 🙂

What can the Hacker Noon community expect to read from you next?

Well, I’m about to repurpose an article I wrote back in 2018 all about a tool I built that lets people analyze their crypto portfolio.

In terms of new stuff, I’m currently working on an article/report that analyzes the investment opportunity of a particular DeFi project in the DEX space. The challenge is everything in the cryptoverse is constantly changing and also coming up with a metric to value these projects isn’t always straight forward. Stay tuned.

Thanks for taking the time to join our “Meet the writer” series. It was a pleasure. Do you have any closing words?

Thanks for the opportunity to write for Hackernoon! I love the content that’s being published and always look forward to the NOONification email.

Also, if anyone wants to hit me up, they can find me on Twitter or LinkedIn. Cheers! 🍻