Ahhh December, the month for eating too much, spending too much and donning clothes you wouldn’t normally be caught dead in. This past week, I was up in Atlanta combining work with play. On my mini “work-ation,” Karen and I had the opportunity to brainstorm our holiday greetings (look for yours in the mail soon), work side-by-side with our friends over at Highgroove studios and don some pretty epic Christmas garb for Big Nerd Ranch’s Tacky Sweater party.

Highgroove studios is a software development company that focuses on building a lean, agile and elegant back-end application. We met them a while back at Ignition Alley (the co-working space we can often be found toiling away at in Atlanta) and have since had the opportunity to work with them on the inlaw|.me project. Although we can’t talk about the project (it’s not yet in Beta), we can certainly talk about HighGroove’s sweet digs. Their office space comes complete with a espresso machine that would make Starbucks envious, a vast array of organic goodies to snack on and work stations decked out with a multitude of Apple gadgets – it was love at first sight. Outside of their material possessions, they have an impressive manifesto that they strive to follow and which makes them a pleasure to work with. In essence, I am sure you will hear us talk about them many times over in the years to come.

Big Nerd Ranch is our super cool client that is dedicated to broadening the intellectual canvas of the world through teaching, consulting and application development. Now, these may be some of the smartest people I have ever met, but they also are the least likely to take themselves too seriously and the most likely to jump on a good time. Therefore, in true Nerd spirit they gathered the office (and a few lucky business associates) together for a Tacky Sweater party. Let me tell you, or you can see for yourself here, there was no holding back on the tacky, the festive and the gender-bending sweater display.

Alright, so it may sound like I did more playing than working on my visit, but I promise you’ll see the fruits of our labors in the next few weeks. Oh, and I forgot to mention, Karen had me put in some sweat equity at the Atlanta Beltline’s 10k, she came in second in her age group, as for me, we won’t talk about that :)