Yes, I know it's been a while.  I can now say I'm a professional Drupaler now.  I'm working with a guy I met at the Fox Valley Meetup.  I'm doing a lot of PC/Server?Networking for him as well as some Drupal so I am now paid to do Drupal.  He also has several Web Based Services that he offers through his business so I am also dusting off the limited experience I have had with PHP to start cleaning up some of the code he has written in preparation to rewrite some of it.

I also attended MidCamp at UIC a couple of weeks ago (March 17-20) and that was a great experience.  I attended one of the training classes "Drupal 8 Migration". It was a good class but I had problems during the morning part of the class because I was trying to use WAMP for my laptop test environment and I think I am not going to mess with that anymore.  I am so at home with accessing my server remotely, and with the Internet easy to connect to there is no need to mess with "local environments" anymore.  I use my Web Sever more often and working remotely it's just as fast as working locally.  

Because of the problems I was having I missed out on to much of the lecture though once I moved to my server the actual migration from Drupal 6 to Drupal 8 went very fast and without problems. The migtate_upgrade module worked well but I missed out on a lot of the finer points of configuration and preparing to migrate the contrib modules to Drupal 8.  

One thing I learned that php7 is a must for Drupal 8 as php7 allows Drupal 8 to run much faster than it does on php5.6 so I have spent the last 28 hours building a new VM built on Debian 8.3, MariaDB10.0.23, PHP 7.0.4, and Nginx 1.8.1,  I started out with 2 LNMP (Debian 7.7 & 7.8) VMs running on 2 - Server 2012 and I have added these.  

One is built and the other one I will build one the Developement one is completed.  I have taken notes while building the first one so the second one should be an easier undertaking.  I am doing to include these notes in a seperate post for those interested.