You've used Shoes, Why The Lucky Stiff's GUI-app toolkit for Ruby, right? No? You've at least heard of it? (If the answer to this is also no, seriously chastise yourself now.)

Ernest Prabhakar has announced that two online "ShoesFests" will be taking place, involving why the lucky stiff and "friends," with the hope of alluring wannabe hackers (whether on Shoes itself or Shoes-based applications):

The goal of these events is to write and share fun little applications using Shoes, a clever little cross-platform GUI toolkit written in Ruby. This will allow us to test, document, and file bugs on how the various Shoes features work on the different supported platforms (Linux, Windows, Mac), in preparation for our next major release on July 31st, 2008.

No Ruby — or programming — experience is required; we’d love to find out how easy it is for novices to learn Shoes! Of course, if you happen to know the Ruby C API, expert help is always appreciated.

There are two ShoesFests, each taking place for 24 hours, from noon GMT (8am Eastern) on Friday, July 11th, and from noon GMT (8am Eastern) on Friday, July 25th. The venue will be #shoes on the Freenode IRC network (irc.freenode.net).

If spending a day on IRC, asking questions, talking nonsense, helping others, and otherwise hacking away on Shoes and Shoes-based applications with a bunch of exciting people sounds fun to you, make sure to put this Friday in your calendar.