Raccoons are very much part of my brand, so many friends (and my boss) sent me the latest adventures of the drunken raccoon in the liquor store. The past couple of years I’ve also been framing my talks about tech as we used to be instagram raccoons – and now we all live in Toronto.
So I made a personality quiz for tech workers – what raccoon are you right now?
Take it. Find out if you’re the drunk raccoon passed out in a liquor store, the MPR raccoon stuck 23 floors up, or the unkillable Toronto raccoon that defeated every “raccoon-proof” garbage bin the city designed.
Creation
I’m a software engineer by training, but JS is not my friend, so I took this as an opportunity to try some vibe coding using Claude. I set up a repo on GitHub to use GitHub pages, committed changes as we went, reviewed the code, and made my own edits after.
It was fun! Without AI it would have taken me much longer to turn this concept into something, and probably not something I would have prioritized. I used AI to give me options, generate the things I didn’t care deeply about, accelerate tedious work, and focused my attention on making the quiz fun and interesting. I started with the list of raccoons and about half the question topics, and then refined from there.
Rather than do it all in one go, I iterated gradually.
- Starting with the base quiz.
- Breaking the files up to make them easier for me to work with.
- Adding extra features like dark mode, runner up reveal, and back buttons one by one (thanks to my partner for the early testing and feature requests).
Once I had something that I believed I could ship, I reached out to an artist (Joe Groove) I work with so they could create some adorable illustrations to go with it.
What I Learned
From idea to working quiz was very quick, and I was able to chip away at it in bits and pieces of time. That’s transformative for small side projects where it’s more about the creative concept than the code quality.
But some caveats:
- No-one else will need to edit this, and I don’t anticipate it will change dramatically.
- It’s a small webpage hosted on GitHub, so no performance considerations.
- There’s no PII, no metrics, no business dependencies.
- If it breaks, I can just take it down (or regenerate it again from scratch).
Back to the Raccoons
The raccoon archetypes matter because they reflect something real about tech work right now. The drunk raccoon in the liquor store. The stuck raccoon in the sewer grate. The alligator rider surfing capitalism precariously.
AI didn’t replace my judgment—it let me build something in hours that would have taken days. I still made every creative decision. I still designed the structure. I still wrote the results that matter.
Go take the quiz. Find out which raccoon you are. And if your result makes you realize thinking more strategically about your career might help, check out my course with Jean at DRI Your Career, or my book The Engineering Leader.
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