Since I didn't have any slides during the talk, here are some resources that cover similar topics and/or were mentioned during the talk itself.
Happy hacking!
The article that inspired the talk: The Startup Trap.
Also check out the follow-up on reasoning when we should NOT write tests: The Pragmatics of TDD.
Alternative way of setting up Rails testing stack with unit/integration/acceptance tests: How I Test Rails Applications
This deck always inspires me to write better tests and better code: Why Our Code Smells
Rspec: I use it for testing, but the opnions about it are devided (DHH, for one, hates it).
Minitest: this is now a default testing framework in Rails 4.0. It can be used in two ways: similar to the Ruby's Test::Unit or with the syntax similar to RSpec.
Spork: a test server that makes invidual tests run faster because it doesn't need to load Rails for every test.
Guard::RSpec: integration of RSpec with Guard (a command line tool to detect changes in filesystem) that allows one to run specs whenever a file is changed.
Capybara: a tool to help you write acceptance tests ("feature specs" in RSpec). It also supports running full-stack tests, ie. running JavaScript in tests through Selenium (which launches an automated browser window).
To run full-stack tests headlessly (so that a real browser doesn't need show up in tests), you can install PhantomJS and use Poltergeist gem.
Konacha: testing framework for JS that integrates into the Rails asset pipeline. You can run tests headlessly with Poltergeist (see above).