Ideal Ruby project structure

I think that is pretty much spot on. By default, Rubygems will add the lib directory to the loadpath, but you can push any directory you want onto that using the $: variable. i.e.

$:.push File.expand_path(File.dirname(__FILE__) + '/../surfcompstuff')

That means when you have say, surfer.rb in that dir, you can require "surfer" anywhere and the file will be found.

Also, as a convention, classes and singletons get a file and modules get a directory. For instance, if you had the LolCatz module and the LolCatz::Moar class that would look like:

lib/
  appname.rb
  lolcatz/
    moar.rb

That is why there is an lib/appname folder because most libraries are in the appname namespace.

Additionally, if you try running the command newgem --simple [projectname] that'll quickly generate a scaffold for you with just the bare essentials for a Ruby project (and by extension a Ruby Gem). There are other tools which do this, I know, but newgem is pretty common. I usually get rid of the TODO file and all the script stuff.

See the following example from http://guides.rubygems.org/what-is-a-gem/

 % tree freewill
    freewill/
    ├── bin/
    │   └── freewill
    ├── lib/
    │   └── freewill.rb
    ├── test/
    │   └── test_freewill.rb
    ├── README
    ├── Rakefile
    └── freewill.gemspec

I attempt to mimic the Rails project structure because my team, which usually deals with Rails, will understand the structure better than another configuration. Convention over Configuration - bleeding over from Rails.