Is there a place where my tests can live without being run by Meteor?
I just started my first Meteor project, and began by writing unit tests with Mocha
As of 0.6.0, an interesting approach is to exclusively use local smart packages for your app, which can be easily tested using Meteor's tinytest. You would have the bare minimum code residing outside of smart packages to bootstrap your app.
EDIT: I've done this approach, and I don't even need bare minimum code residing outside of smart packages. The whole app is packages.