I wanted to start out my journalism journey by documenting one of the most impressive crunch deadline stories I’ve ever come across. This is the story of how Tate Singleton single-handedly built and shipped coeprintlab.com, the primary platform powering California Baptist University’s 3D print operations.
I first met Tate Singleton at a business competition at UCI, and we ended up spending hours talking non stop about web architecture and software projects. That was when he told me the crazy backstory of how coeprintlab.com actually got built.
When Tate took over the project in the summer of 2025, he had created a sharp-looking frontend interface the semester prior, but zero functional backend infrastructure behind it. To make matters worse, there were only two weeks left before thousands of incoming engineering students flooded onto campus expecting a fully operational 3D print submission portal.
Instead of scaling back features, Tate practically lived in the lab for those two weeks. With a little initial guidance from an upperclassman friend, he pulled endless hours writing code to design, build, and ship a production-grade backend and admin pipeline completely from scratch before the first day of class.
He didn't just hack together a temporary fix, he engineered a full-scale system that ran all of the labs operations. To sum it up he developed:
End to End File & Submission Processing:He designed database backed workflows built to validates and routes high volumes of heavy 3D files cleanly without choking the server.
Browser-Native 3D Visualization: He built a custom 3D model viewer and slicer from scratch using JavaScript and WebGL, allowing students to inspect, rotate, and verify their models directly in the browser before submitting.
Internal Staff Automation: He developed a custom internal tooling for the lab staff to streamline quality control, job queue management, and daily operational bottlenecks.
High-Performance Architecture: He expanded the system capabilities by starting work on a full slicer inside of the form itself, he taught himself how to use WebGL in a matter of months and optimized it so it could even run on potato computers.
From what he's told me in recent times he has since moved on from the lab role due to reasons he couldn't share, however, the core software and architecture he engineered under insane pressure still power the submission workflow for CBU engineering students every single day.
It’s easily one of the most impressive examples of raw engineering clutch under a tight deadline I’ve ever seen. Huge respect to Tate for pulling that off his work on coeprintlab.com speaks for itself to countless CS majors who are in need of some hope.
-sq :)
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