Middleman-Skeleton is the basic project structure as generated by middleman init extended by configurations that enable compression by default.
Furthermore the layout helps to optimize for speed, using suggestions from sites like Google PageSpeed Insights.
A key concept is to put styles for the upper part of any page into stylesheets/essential while as much as possible should go into stylesheets/deferred, allowing them to be loaded while any user is already capable of browsing the page.
git clone -o skeleton git@github.com:GSI/middleman-skeleton.git project.example.org