I'm going to start off by assuming that you are working on an HPC environment. As a user of an HPC you generally do not have system administration privileges, so tools need to be build in your home directory. When you sign into your account, you are usually placed in your home directory which will be something like /home/eragasa
SUGGESTED DIRECTORY STRUCTURE
# binaries and links to binaries
mkdir ~/bin
# since there needs to be consistency in your compile tools, I suggest building your compilation libraries in a similar way
# start building the directory structures using the most general tool in the compile chain then to the latest
mkdir ~/usr
mkdir ~/usr/gnu8
mkdir ~/usr/gnu8/openmpi3/
# i have a tendency to use the ~/opt directory as a place to download and build software
mkdir ~/opt
# Since I do development work and also work with other people's repositories, it makes sense to have a repo directory
mkdir ~/repos
# I have a projects folder, which I use for projects
mkdir ~/projects