● The Workshop · Week of 5 October 2026

A siddur that knows what time it is, a lamb nobody can claim, and my face in 10,000 letters

Shalom friends,

This was a big week in the workshop: 40 commits, ~22,000 new lines, two daf games, one whole siddur, and a three.js bronze quill that cost 88 cents to make. Here's what shipped.

🎬 The trailer

This week, in 36 epic seconds

🏆 Headliner

The Mega Siddur is live

A full working siddur (Ashkenaz, Sefard or Edot HaMizrach) with a “Now” button that checks your local sunrise and sunset and opens the right tefillah. It knows when to add rain or dew, Ya'aleh VeYavo, Al HaNisim, Hallel, Tachanun, the Omer and fast days, and it does Israel vs. Diaspora too.

Every paragraph pulls in sources from Sefaria (Olat Reiyah, halacha, Tanakh, Talmud), and there's a layer for my own commentary. It also has a davening mode, a parchment theme for night, and works offline for any section you've already opened.

Open the Mega Siddur →

✒️ Micrography grew up

From photo to laser-cut acrylic, all in the browser

The micrography tool draws your photo using tiny Hebrew letters. This week it got:

• New techniques based on real manuscript micrography: engraving with cross-hatching, contour lines and a spiral, plus a carpet-page frame.
• A scene editor that removes the background in your browser (MediaPipe) and lets you add hearts, hamsas, menorahs, Stars of David and words.
• Laser-cutter export: real-size SVGs with the letters converted to outlines, so they open in CorelDRAW without the font installed.
• Print, frame or case it through DoppelGifter, which now runs the same engine.
• And it no longer freezes phones. The worst main-thread stall went from 1.3s to under 0.2s.

Write yourself in letters →

📚 Parasha Books

Picture books where your kids are the stars

Peshat-based picture books for Bereshit, Noach and Lech Lecha. Upload your kids and they get drawn into every page. The fun part was a model bake-off: FLUX kept changing the child's face from page to page, but GPT Image 2 at low quality (about a cent an image) kept the same face, headband and earrings throughout. You can now redraw any page with a note like “only one child.”

Fun fact: every illustration in this email came from that same model at low quality. Yes, including the one of me.

Browse the library →

🎮 Daf Yomi Arcade

Two new games from Bekhorot

Whose Lamb Is It? (Bekhorot 11): a firstborn donkey gets redeemed with a lamb, and then the lambs, donkeys and grain change hands through a stranger, a thief, a kohen grandfather and a gentile seller. At the end of each chain you have to say who's holding it.

The Donkey Nobody Redeemed (Bekhorot 10): וְאִם לֹא תִפְדֶּה וַעֲרַפְתּוֹ. What can you actually do with a donkey that was never redeemed?

Play the arcade →

⚡ Quick hits

Also new this week

🤝 Work with me

Want something like this for your team?

Everything in this email was built with AI as a co-pilot. I help teams do the same:

• AI & Claude training: prompt engineering, AI strategy and hands-on projects, built around your team's real work.
• G2 positioning & AEO: get found by buyers and by AI answer engines, from a former G2 Principal Analyst in AI, Automation and Analytics.
• Custom websites: fast, distinctive sites like this one.

Reply and tell me what to build next, or which of these broke on your phone. I really do read every reply.

Shavua tov from the workshop,
Matthew