https://medium.com/elixirlabs/railway-oriented-programming-in-elixir-with-pattern-matching-on-function-level-and-pipelining-e53972cede98
The common recommendation in Elixir is to let it crash (more accurately it is let a supervisor handle the error ). This is normally the case when you have small processes.
There is another pattern that can be used.
If all of your functions return {:ok, something} or {:error, reason} then technically the function is a Monad. This allows pipelines in which data and errors can be passed through cleanly.
Railway oriented programming takes this a stage further by having defined pipelines that have a good and an error route. It is possible for errors to be handled and returned to the good track.
Developer Rants 