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                        <id>http://rias.be/feed</id>
                                <link href="http://rias.be/feed" rel="self"></link>
                                <title><![CDATA[Rias.be]]></title>
                                <logo>/assets/social.png</logo>
                                <subtitle>I&#039;m Rias, a full stack software engineer from Antwerp specialized in Laravel, Livewire, Craft CMS, and React.</subtitle>
                                                    <updated>2026-04-10T00:00:00+00:00</updated>
                        <entry>
            <title><![CDATA[Lock a shared test database for parallel test processes]]></title>
            <link rel="alternate" href="https://rias.be/blog/lock-a-shared-test-database-for-parallel-test-processes" />
            <id>https://rias.be/blog/lock-a-shared-test-database-for-parallel-test-processes</id>
            <author>
                <name><![CDATA[Rias Van der Veken]]></name>
                <email><![CDATA[hey@rias.be]]></email>

            </author>
            <summary type="html">
                <![CDATA[AI coding agents love to run tests in parallel processes.
Running tests in parallel is great until multiple processes try to use the same local test database at once. This is mainly useful for feature tests that actually touch the database.
]]>
            </summary>
                                    <category term="indigo" />
                        <updated>2026-04-10T00:00:00+00:00</updated>
        </entry>
            <entry>
            <title><![CDATA[Adding text to an image using PHP and Imagick]]></title>
            <link rel="alternate" href="https://rias.be/blog/adding-text-to-an-image-using-php-and-imagick" />
            <id>https://rias.be/blog/adding-text-to-an-image-using-php-and-imagick</id>
            <author>
                <name><![CDATA[Rias Van der Veken]]></name>
                <email><![CDATA[hey@rias.be]]></email>

            </author>
            <summary type="html">
                <![CDATA[Just like my previous article on adding text to an image using GD, this is how to add that same text using Imagick instead
]]>
            </summary>
                                    <category term="indigo" />
                        <updated>2024-03-05T00:00:00+00:00</updated>
        </entry>
            <entry>
            <title><![CDATA[Adding text to an image using PHP and GD]]></title>
            <link rel="alternate" href="https://rias.be/blog/adding-text-to-an-image-using-php-and-gd" />
            <id>https://rias.be/blog/adding-text-to-an-image-using-php-and-gd</id>
            <author>
                <name><![CDATA[Rias Van der Veken]]></name>
                <email><![CDATA[hey@rias.be]]></email>

            </author>
            <summary type="html">
                <![CDATA[There might be many reasons you need to add text on top of an existing image. The main reason for me was to add the title of a post, on top of a "template" background image to generate SEO images.
]]>
            </summary>
                                    <category term="indigo" />
                        <updated>2024-03-01T00:00:00+00:00</updated>
        </entry>
            <entry>
            <title><![CDATA[Adding "Stale While Revalidate" functionality to Laravel's Cache]]></title>
            <link rel="alternate" href="https://rias.be/blog/adding-stale-while-revalidate-functionality-to-laravels-cache" />
            <id>https://rias.be/blog/adding-stale-while-revalidate-functionality-to-laravels-cache</id>
            <author>
                <name><![CDATA[Rias Van der Veken]]></name>
                <email><![CDATA[hey@rias.be]]></email>

            </author>
            <summary type="html">
                <![CDATA[Stale While Revalidate (SWR) is a strategy to first return the data from the cache (stale), then send the fetch request (revalidate), and finally come up with the up-to-date data.
]]>
            </summary>
                                    <category term="red" />
                        <updated>2023-11-09T00:00:00+00:00</updated>
        </entry>
            <entry>
            <title><![CDATA[Configure Laravel to use Immutable dates by default]]></title>
            <link rel="alternate" href="https://rias.be/blog/configure-laravel-to-use-immutable-dates-by-default" />
            <id>https://rias.be/blog/configure-laravel-to-use-immutable-dates-by-default</id>
            <author>
                <name><![CDATA[Rias Van der Veken]]></name>
                <email><![CDATA[hey@rias.be]]></email>

            </author>
            <summary type="html">
                <![CDATA[By default, Laravel uses Carbon for dates, but the object returned by the \\Illuminate\\Support\\Facades\\Date helper is mutable.
]]>
            </summary>
                                    <category term="red" />
                        <updated>2023-09-29T00:00:00+00:00</updated>
        </entry>
            <entry>
            <title><![CDATA[Tailing multiple Laravel logs with Envoy]]></title>
            <link rel="alternate" href="https://rias.be/blog/tailing-multiple-laravel-logs-with-envoy" />
            <id>https://rias.be/blog/tailing-multiple-laravel-logs-with-envoy</id>
            <author>
                <name><![CDATA[Rias Van der Veken]]></name>
                <email><![CDATA[hey@rias.be]]></email>

            </author>
            <summary type="html">
                <![CDATA[When you have deployed your Laravel application across multiple servers, for example when running multiple workers, you can run into a situation where you need to quickly tail the log to see what is going on.
]]>
            </summary>
                                    <category term="red" />
                        <updated>2022-12-12T00:00:00+00:00</updated>
        </entry>
            <entry>
            <title><![CDATA[Adding CORS headers to Laravel Valet]]></title>
            <link rel="alternate" href="https://rias.be/blog/adding-cors-headers-to-laravel-valet" />
            <id>https://rias.be/blog/adding-cors-headers-to-laravel-valet</id>
            <author>
                <name><![CDATA[Rias Van der Veken]]></name>
                <email><![CDATA[hey@rias.be]]></email>

            </author>
            <summary type="html">
                <![CDATA[When working on a project with subdomains, you can run into CORS issues locally when using Laravel Valet when your assets are on the main domain.
]]>
            </summary>
                                    <category term="red" />
                        <updated>2022-11-23T00:00:00+00:00</updated>
        </entry>
            <entry>
            <title><![CDATA[Keep your Filament admin dashboard fast by lazy loading widgets]]></title>
            <link rel="alternate" href="https://rias.be/blog/keep-your-filament-admin-dashboard-fast-by-lazy-loading-widgets" />
            <id>https://rias.be/blog/keep-your-filament-admin-dashboard-fast-by-lazy-loading-widgets</id>
            <author>
                <name><![CDATA[Rias Van der Veken]]></name>
                <email><![CDATA[hey@rias.be]]></email>

            </author>
            <summary type="html">
                <![CDATA[Filament is a great admin panel for Laravel built with Livewire, one of its features is creating dashboard widgets to get quick stats of your application.
]]>
            </summary>
                                    <category term="yellow" />
                        <updated>2022-11-07T00:00:00+00:00</updated>
        </entry>
            <entry>
            <title><![CDATA[Wildcard subdomain SSL certificates with Let's Encrypt and Bunny DNS]]></title>
            <link rel="alternate" href="https://rias.be/blog/wildcard-subdomain-ssl-certificates-with-let-s-encrypt-and-bunny-dns" />
            <id>https://rias.be/blog/wildcard-subdomain-ssl-certificates-with-let-s-encrypt-and-bunny-dns</id>
            <author>
                <name><![CDATA[Rias Van der Veken]]></name>
                <email><![CDATA[hey@rias.be]]></email>

            </author>
            <summary type="html">
                <![CDATA[Creating wildcard subdomain SSL certificates isn't that straightforward with Let's encrypt as a normal SSL certificate. As you need to prove you own the full domain before you can issue a certificate.
]]>
            </summary>
                                    <category term="orange" />
                        <updated>2022-11-01T00:00:00+00:00</updated>
        </entry>
            <entry>
            <title><![CDATA[Encrypting Laravel Eloquent models with CipherSweet]]></title>
            <link rel="alternate" href="https://rias.be/blog/encrypting-laravel-eloquent-models-with-ciphersweet" />
            <id>https://rias.be/blog/encrypting-laravel-eloquent-models-with-ciphersweet</id>
            <author>
                <name><![CDATA[Rias Van der Veken]]></name>
                <email><![CDATA[hey@rias.be]]></email>

            </author>
            <summary type="html">
                <![CDATA[In your project, you might store some sensitive personal or credential data in your database. Should an unauthorised person get access to your DB, all this sensitive can be read.
To solve this problem, you can encrypt the data. This way, unauthorised persons cannot read it, but your application can still decrypt it when you need to display or work with the data.
]]>
            </summary>
                                    <category term="red" />
                        <updated>2022-07-01T00:00:00+00:00</updated>
        </entry>
            <entry>
            <title><![CDATA[Highlighting code using Sidecar & Shiki]]></title>
            <link rel="alternate" href="https://rias.be/blog/highlighting-code-using-sidecar-and-shiki" />
            <id>https://rias.be/blog/highlighting-code-using-sidecar-and-shiki</id>
            <author>
                <name><![CDATA[Rias Van der Veken]]></name>
                <email><![CDATA[hey@rias.be]]></email>

            </author>
            <summary type="html">
                <![CDATA[ShikiÂ is a beautiful syntax highlighter powered by the same language engine that many code editors use. We've just released a package that allows you to runÂ ShikiÂ on AWS Lambda throughÂ Sidecar.
You won't need to install Node, or any of Shiki's dependencies, on your server.
]]>
            </summary>
                                    <category term="red" />
                        <updated>2022-06-27T00:00:00+00:00</updated>
        </entry>
            <entry>
            <title><![CDATA[A Laravel package to onboard your users]]></title>
            <link rel="alternate" href="https://rias.be/blog/laravel-package-to-onboard-your-users" />
            <id>https://rias.be/blog/laravel-package-to-onboard-your-users</id>
            <author>
                <name><![CDATA[Rias Van der Veken]]></name>
                <email><![CDATA[hey@rias.be]]></email>

            </author>
            <summary type="html">
                <![CDATA[Onboarding your users is one of the most important things you can do in your SaaS or application. After all, first impressions matter!
]]>
            </summary>
                                    <category term="red" />
                        <updated>2022-06-21T00:00:00+00:00</updated>
        </entry>
            <entry>
            <title><![CDATA[Improved Laravel Blade support in Statamic 3.3]]></title>
            <link rel="alternate" href="https://rias.be/blog/improved-laravel-blade-support-in-statamic-3-3" />
            <id>https://rias.be/blog/improved-laravel-blade-support-in-statamic-3-3</id>
            <author>
                <name><![CDATA[Rias Van der Veken]]></name>
                <email><![CDATA[hey@rias.be]]></email>

            </author>
            <summary type="html">
                <![CDATA[Statamic 3.3 has added some additional improvements to their Blade templates support, which makes using Statamic together with Laravel's native Blade templates truly a joy to work with.
]]>
            </summary>
                                    <category term="pink" />
                        <updated>2022-03-10T00:00:00+00:00</updated>
        </entry>
            <entry>
            <title><![CDATA[Mocking Browsershot for faster tests]]></title>
            <link rel="alternate" href="https://rias.be/blog/mocking-browsershot-for-faster-tests" />
            <id>https://rias.be/blog/mocking-browsershot-for-faster-tests</id>
            <author>
                <name><![CDATA[Rias Van der Veken]]></name>
                <email><![CDATA[hey@rias.be]]></email>

            </author>
            <summary type="html">
                <![CDATA[Spatie's Browsershot is a wonderful package that uses puppeteer to render a web page to transform it into an image or PDF. Having this functionality covered by tests generally requires you to install puppeteer in your CI environment and can slow down your tests a lot.
]]>
            </summary>
                                    <category term="red" />
                        <updated>2022-03-02T00:00:00+00:00</updated>
        </entry>
            <entry>
            <title><![CDATA[Running PHPUnit tests in parallel using GitHub actions]]></title>
            <link rel="alternate" href="https://rias.be/blog/running-phpunit-tests-in-parallel-using-github-actions" />
            <id>https://rias.be/blog/running-phpunit-tests-in-parallel-using-github-actions</id>
            <author>
                <name><![CDATA[Rias Van der Veken]]></name>
                <email><![CDATA[hey@rias.be]]></email>

            </author>
            <summary type="html">
                <![CDATA[One of our projects has a really large test suite that isn't optimised to run with Laravel's parallel testing. It was starting to take more than 15 minutes to have the whole test suite run inside Github Actions, which is when I searched for a better way to do this.
]]>
            </summary>
                                    <category term="purple" />
                        <updated>2022-03-02T00:00:00+00:00</updated>
        </entry>
            <entry>
            <title><![CDATA[Correctly highlighting code using Shiki & PHP]]></title>
            <link rel="alternate" href="https://rias.be/blog/correctly-highlighting-code-using-shiki-php" />
            <id>https://rias.be/blog/correctly-highlighting-code-using-shiki-php</id>
            <author>
                <name><![CDATA[Rias Van der Veken]]></name>
                <email><![CDATA[hey@rias.be]]></email>

            </author>
            <summary type="html">
                <![CDATA[Highlighting code blocks correctly on your website is a more difficult problem to solve than you'd expect. There are many great solutions like Prism or Highlight.js, but they often have difficulty with newer syntax. Inspired by Miguel's blogpost, I set out to create a PHP wrapper around Shiki to do just that.
]]>
            </summary>
                                    <category term="red" />
                        <updated>2021-07-11T00:00:00+00:00</updated>
        </entry>
            <entry>
            <title><![CDATA[Using Laravel's parallel testing inside your package tests]]></title>
            <link rel="alternate" href="https://rias.be/blog/using-laravel-parallel-testing-inside-your-package-tests" />
            <id>https://rias.be/blog/using-laravel-parallel-testing-inside-your-package-tests</id>
            <author>
                <name><![CDATA[Rias Van der Veken]]></name>
                <email><![CDATA[hey@rias.be]]></email>

            </author>
            <summary type="html">
                <![CDATA[Laravel recently added parallel testing to the framework using the Paratest package which runs PHPUnit in separate parallel processes. Adding support for this in your own package tests is pretty straightforward using orchestral/testbench.
]]>
            </summary>
                                    <category term="red" />
                        <updated>2021-03-23T00:00:00+00:00</updated>
        </entry>
            <entry>
            <title><![CDATA[Responsive Art direction in Statamic]]></title>
            <link rel="alternate" href="https://rias.be/blog/responsive-art-direction-in-statamic" />
            <id>https://rias.be/blog/responsive-art-direction-in-statamic</id>
            <author>
                <name><![CDATA[Rias Van der Veken]]></name>
                <email><![CDATA[hey@rias.be]]></email>

            </author>
            <summary type="html">
                <![CDATA[Art direction is nothing new, though there hasn't been an easy way to do it with most CMSs yet. Statamic, with the help of the spatie/statamic-responsive-images addon now offers an author- and developer-friendly way doing Art Direction with images.
]]>
            </summary>
                                    <category term="pink" />
                        <updated>2021-02-05T00:00:00+00:00</updated>
        </entry>
            <entry>
            <title><![CDATA[Using composer patches]]></title>
            <link rel="alternate" href="https://rias.be/blog/using-composer-patches" />
            <id>https://rias.be/blog/using-composer-patches</id>
            <author>
                <name><![CDATA[Rias Van der Veken]]></name>
                <email><![CDATA[hey@rias.be]]></email>

            </author>
            <summary type="html">
                <![CDATA[When you use software that is open source, you'll sometimes run into issues or small bugs that have already been fixed by the community in a PR or an issue, but have yet to be merged and/or released. If you're impatient and need that fix now, composer patches can be a solution for this problem.
]]>
            </summary>
                                    <category term="purple" />
                        <updated>2021-02-03T00:00:00+00:00</updated>
        </entry>
            <entry>
            <title><![CDATA[Using Laravel Blade with Statamic]]></title>
            <link rel="alternate" href="https://rias.be/blog/using-laravel-blade-with-statamic" />
            <id>https://rias.be/blog/using-laravel-blade-with-statamic</id>
            <author>
                <name><![CDATA[Rias Van der Veken]]></name>
                <email><![CDATA[hey@rias.be]]></email>

            </author>
            <summary type="html">
                <![CDATA[Statamic v3 has added support for other template languages in addition to their own "Antlers" templating language. Recently when creating a new website for one of our clients, we ran into some performance issues with Antlers. This really only happens when you have a large amount of partials and big templates, since Antlers does all its parsing & rendering on the fly with Regex.
]]>
            </summary>
                                    <category term="red" />
                        <updated>2020-12-21T00:00:00+00:00</updated>
        </entry>
            <entry>
            <title><![CDATA[Deploying a Statamic site to Netlify]]></title>
            <link rel="alternate" href="https://rias.be/blog/deploying-a-statamic-3-site-to-netlify" />
            <id>https://rias.be/blog/deploying-a-statamic-3-site-to-netlify</id>
            <author>
                <name><![CDATA[Rias Van der Veken]]></name>
                <email><![CDATA[hey@rias.be]]></email>

            </author>
            <summary type="html">
                <![CDATA[Deploying a Statamic v3 site to Netlify using Statamic's SSG addon.
]]>
            </summary>
                                    <category term="pink" />
                        <updated>2020-04-07T00:00:00+00:00</updated>
        </entry>
            <entry>
            <title><![CDATA[Storing and retrieving webmentions with Firebase]]></title>
            <link rel="alternate" href="https://rias.be/blog/storing-and-retrieving-webmentions-with-firebase" />
            <id>https://rias.be/blog/storing-and-retrieving-webmentions-with-firebase</id>
            <author>
                <name><![CDATA[Rias Van der Veken]]></name>
                <email><![CDATA[hey@rias.be]]></email>

            </author>
            <summary type="html">
                <![CDATA[I've recently transformed my Statamic powered site into a statically hosted version, mostly because services like Netlify and Firebase offer free hosting for static files, which means I don't need to manage and pay for my own server. The only dynamic piece that was missing was a way for people to react or comment to my blog entries.
]]>
            </summary>
                                    <category term="yellow" />
                        <updated>2019-10-07T07:30:00+00:00</updated>
        </entry>
            <entry>
            <title><![CDATA[Deploying a Statamic v2 site to Netlify]]></title>
            <link rel="alternate" href="https://rias.be/blog/deploying-a-statamic-site-to-netlify" />
            <id>https://rias.be/blog/deploying-a-statamic-site-to-netlify</id>
            <author>
                <name><![CDATA[Rias Van der Veken]]></name>
                <email><![CDATA[hey@rias.be]]></email>

            </author>
            <summary type="html">
                <![CDATA[My personal website & blog has been hosted on a DigitalOcean droplet for years, but recently I've been trying to move away from hosting and managing my own server.
]]>
            </summary>
                                    <category term="pink" />
                        <updated>2019-09-16T00:00:00+00:00</updated>
        </entry>
            <entry>
            <title><![CDATA[Creating a Statamic site helper for Laravel Mix]]></title>
            <link rel="alternate" href="https://rias.be/blog/creating-a-statamic-site-helper-for-laravel-mix" />
            <id>https://rias.be/blog/creating-a-statamic-site-helper-for-laravel-mix</id>
            <author>
                <name><![CDATA[Rias Van der Veken]]></name>
                <email><![CDATA[hey@rias.be]]></email>

            </author>
            <summary type="html">
                <![CDATA[Laravel Mix isnât provided by default in Statamic v2, in this short post Iâll show you how to create a quick site helper to read the mix-manifest.json and output versioned assets.
]]>
            </summary>
                                    <category term="pink" />
                        <updated>2019-07-31T00:00:00+00:00</updated>
        </entry>
            <entry>
            <title><![CDATA[A colorful Statamic Addon]]></title>
            <link rel="alternate" href="https://rias.be/blog/a-colorful-statamic-addon" />
            <id>https://rias.be/blog/a-colorful-statamic-addon</id>
            <author>
                <name><![CDATA[Rias Van der Veken]]></name>
                <email><![CDATA[hey@rias.be]]></email>

            </author>
            <summary type="html">
                <![CDATA[Clients and content editors often want a lot of choices and make everything customizable to fit their style or the content.
]]>
            </summary>
                                    <category term="pink" />
                        <updated>2019-07-17T00:00:00+00:00</updated>
        </entry>
            <entry>
            <title><![CDATA[Going serverless with Hugo and Netlify]]></title>
            <link rel="alternate" href="https://rias.be/blog/going-serverless-with-hugo-and-netlify" />
            <id>https://rias.be/blog/going-serverless-with-hugo-and-netlify</id>
            <author>
                <name><![CDATA[Rias Van der Veken]]></name>
                <email><![CDATA[hey@rias.be]]></email>

            </author>
            <summary type="html">
                <![CDATA[I recently worked on the new Spatie docs website. We moved our site from a Digital Ocean server to Netlify, a serverless platform.
]]>
            </summary>
                                    <category term="green" />
                        <updated>2019-07-09T00:00:00+00:00</updated>
        </entry>
    </feed>
