Years ago the enigmatic Rubyist _why created Shoes, a tiny GUI toolkit for writing fun, simple applications in Ruby. Shoes served as the foundation for Hackety Hack, a programming environment specially designed to be accessible to kids. In the wake of _why's departure, many people assumed Shoes was finished as well. Such is not the case! Shoes has continued to evolve and grow, and the latest revision (Shoes4) builds off the cross-platform strengths of JRuby and SWT. If you've ever wanted to write a desktop app as easily as you write a web page, Shoes is for you. If you've ever wanted to get involved in a welcoming, accessible open-source project, we'll show you how to hack on Shoes. Get your Shoes on, and let's build something awesome!