I have some guidelines I apply to myself to help reduce cyclic references caused by closures capturing self.

1. I never explicitly refer to self (as in self.someProperty or self.someFunc()) unless I absolutely have to.
2. I have a simple rule of thumb, if I see a self. in a closure, I double check to make sure it is necessary. This is because self. in a closure means the closure captures self and holds a strong reference to self. Most of the time, this can lead to cyclic references either now or later. I try my best to avoid them.

Because of (1) above, self. will only appear:

1. in init() and its variations
2. when I need to assign to a new local variable in a function and the new local variable has the same name as a function or a property
3. when closure captures self.

This means I can run grep -R "self\." . and do a quick scan when I suspect a memory leak.