Wrap nil with try and avoid errors

Here comes the tip from Roman, very small and probably obvious, but if you do not know about this method, it will be a nice little thing to keep in mind. When trying to call a method on a possibly nil object, we use try:

some_object.try(:some_method)

But what if you need to pass the arguments to this method? Well, it can be done with the second argument to try method:

some_object.try(:some_method, some_args)

This can be used when trying to fetch an element of a potential array:

arr = [10, 20, 30]
    arr.try(:at, 1) => 20

Note that try([1]) is wrong, you should use :at.