Create your directory structure properly. What I usually do is start from the root directory of my user, for example, C:\Users\Amr in Windows or /Users/amr in a Nix-based OS, and start adding the structure of my development environment. So, in Windows, for instance, my workspace under the user directory looks like the following screenshot:

Create a dev directory where all the development will reside.

Create an apps directory, which will contain all the software starting from JDK to the middleware inside the Oracle directory.

Create a myworkspaces directory inside the dev directory, which will include different workspaces for each technology—you are free here to make it as per technology or per actual project—and then in each technology you have your different applications.

Create different environment variables for your development environment's dev directory, apps directory, and myworkspaces directory. This extra step will make it easy when you are installing different software to reach these directories easily using the command line. You should end up with the following environment variables:

$DEV_HOME=/Users/amr/dev
$APPS_HOME=$DEV_HOME/apps
$WORK_HOME=$DEV_HOME/myworkspaces

You can do the same in Windows by simply navigating to System Properties | Advanced | Environment variables and create three variables with these names:

DEV_HOME=C:\Users\Amr\dev
APPS_HOME=%DEV_HOME%\apps
WORK_HOME=%DEV_HOME%\myworkspaces

set DEV_HOME=C:\Users\Amr\dev
set APPS_HOME=%DEV_HOME%\apps
set WORK_HOME=%DEV_HOME%\myworkspaces

If you have Mac or other Nix-based systems, you can achieve the previous result by changing the .bash_profile file using a text editor or any text editing tools.

You can create one if none exists by opening a terminal and entering the following command:

vi ~/.bash_profile

Edit the file by pressing I to enter the edit mode, and add the following entries to the end of the file:

export DEV_HOME=/Users/Amr/dev
export APPS_HOME=$DEV_HOME/apps
export WORK_HOME=$DEV_HOME/myworkspaces

Save by pressing Esc and then :wq