These are my rules of thumb in priority order:

1. Don’t use optionals.

2. If you must use optionals due to technicalities (e.g. IBOutlet, weak reference, etc.), make it implicitly-unwrapped.

3. If you can’t make it implicitly unwrapped due to ‘nil’ being a legitimate value, then use regular optionals, but force-unwrap it everywhere except where `nil` is expected to occur.

There’s nothing worse than a codebase unnecessarily littered with

    guard let x = x else { return }

If my assumptions about some value were wrong, I want it to break as loud as possible. Silently returning (or making up some silly default value like an empty string or zero) is the worst thing you can do for yourself and your colleagues. (Except if you’re a manager whose bonus is tied to your app’s crash stats)