exit on error in bash

I have often cluttered my bash scripts with :

if ! some_command ; then
    printf '%s\n' 'failed'
    exit 1
fi

However the other day on hackernews I found this excellent article:

Shell script mistakes
There are many good nuggets of knowledge in it, but the one thing that I really liked was the simple fact that you do not have to check for errors after every command that could possible fail.
All you have to do is set -e at the top of the script and if a command returns other than 0, the script will exit.