My Volunteer Experience - Robert Quoc Huy Tran

Welcome Robert!

Robert Quoc Huy Tran joined the SAcommunity Website Rebuild Team on 13 August 2024

Total Hours 151 This Year 103 Joined 13 August 2024 Last Check-in 2 September 2025 

Robert Quoc  Huy  Tran recently  graduated from  the  University  of  Adelaide  with  a Master's  degree  in  Data  Science.  He  is passionate  about  programming, particularly in  Data  Science  and  Artificial  Intelligence, and  has  excelled  academically while researching new technologies in these fields. In  addition  to  volunteering  with  Connecting Up,  Robert  works  as  a  freelancer  at Brokerpedia in Sydney. 

Robert joined Connecting Up to connect with friends,  gain the  skills,  confidence,  and experience  needed  to  advance  in  his programming  career.  He  wants  to  support and  give  back  to  his  community and  sees Connecting  Up  as  a  practical  way  to achieve this.

Connecting Up Staff Meeting 13 August 2024

This was my first time joining the Connecting Up staff meeting, and I was delighted to see how friendly and welcoming everyone was. We had a lot of fun during the session led by Pankaj Chhalotre.

RU OK Day with Cake!

Website Rebuild Team Meeting 10 September 2024

Connecting Up Monthly Meeting 10 September 2024

 After a month, we had our regular monthly meeting, followed by another session focused on understanding the current website. The goal is to upgrade it from Drupal 6 to Drupal 10, so we can clearly define the next steps for the upgrade.

SAcommunity Website Rebuild Project 15 October 2024
Image: Lucia, Stathis Avramis, Robert, Todd

After another month, we had a meeting focused on the database to gain a deeper understanding of our websites. Next, we’ll begin learning and setting up Drupal 10.

SAcommunity Website Rebuild Project 11 March 2025
Image: Lucia, Rex, Robert

I successfully upgraded the Lozin theme from Drupal 6 to Drupal 10 with Cameron’s help. After exporting the organisation data with Cameron and receiving the new database schema from Stathis, I began writing a script to migrate the data into the new database. Following a few meetings, we decided to move forward with upgrading to Drupal 11 instead of Drupal 10.

SAcommunity Website Rebuild Project 11 March 2025

Image: Pankaj Chhalotre, Yong Kheng Beh, Stathis Avramis, Robert Quoc Huy Tran, Joe Xuanqiao Zhang

This meeting marked a key turning point in our migration strategy. Leveraging his extensive Drupal expertise, Pankaj advised the team to stop trying to replicate the legacy Drupal 6 database schema in detail. Instead, he highlighted the importance of adopting Drupal’s native architecture—leveraging nodes, entities, content types, and relationships as intended by the framework.

His recommendation to ‘experiment and learn by doing’ shifted our mindset from rigid schema replication to iterative development, enabling us to make faster, more meaningful progress.

Afterward, we deepened our knowledge through additional Drupal 11 training courses and began applying those concepts directly to our systems. During this phase, we also confirmed that the Lozin theme from Drupal 6 was incompatible with Drupal 11. As a result, we made the decision to purchase a new Lozin theme built specifically for Drupal 11 to ensure compatibility and maintainability moving forward.

SAcommunity Website Rebuild Project 3 June 2025

Image: Michael Adams, Yong Kheng Beh, Stathis Avramis, Robert Quoc Huy Tran, Joe Xuanqiao Zhang

Michael provided critical technical guidance on shaping our data migration strategy. His recommendations focused on:

• Adopting a test-driven migration workflow — exporting data in small batches, validating format and integrity, then scaling gradually.

• Leveraging Python scripts and REST APIs for data cleaning and normalization.

• Preserving file path integrity to ensure assets remained linked post-migration.

• Maintaining user account relationships via unique identifiers to preserve authorship and content ownership.

Building on this, I experimented with exporting data to JSON instead of CSV due to recurring data inconsistencies. Because the dev server had resource limits, I split the migration into smaller bulk exports rather than attempting a full export at once.

I also optimized the migration scripts: extending them beyond basic SQL extraction to support multiple fields, improving query performance, and ensuring faster execution overall.

Additionally, I'm integrating AI-generated summaries for each organisation, providing a high-level overview of the data to support validation and decision-making during the migration process.