I agree that it's a bad idea to have a null check on req & req.getHeaders(). One might think that this kind of thing makes your code more resilient, but instead

I agree that it's a bad idea to have a null check on req & req.getHeaders(). One might think that this kind of thing makes your code more resilient, but instead it just makes it harder to track down the inevitable bugs like forgetting to initialize Request#headers.