Daily Software Tips & Tricks

Bite-sized knowledge to improve your coding skills daily.

Stop the 'Cannot read property of undefined' errors

February 10, 2026

We've all been bitten by the dreaded runtime error when trying to access a nested property on an object that might be null. Instead of writing long chains of manual checks, use the optional chaining operator (?.). Writing `user?.profile?.name` will simply return undefined if any part of the chain is missing, preventing your app from crashing. It makes your code significantly cleaner and more resilient to unexpected data structures.