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- Take the Dead Reckoning Challenge: Laying the Keel [Beginner]
Michal_Gebacki
Community Team
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12 Aug 2026
02:20 PM
| Level: Beginner |
👉 This Challenge, with all of its three levels, created Katharina Sick (@ksick) from the OffOn Community!
This Challenge Level is best suited for:
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Platform engineers, developers, and anyone curious about internal developer platforms and self-service scaffolding. No prior Backstage experience is needed, but familiarity with YAML and basic Git concepts will help. |
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Mission objective
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Key Learnings
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This Challenge’s Level story:
The commission office has been open for weeks, but nothing is being processed. Captains submit their manifests to register a new vessel, wait, and hear nothing back. No repository of record ever appears in the archives, and the vessel never makes it into the fleet registry.
The commissioning procedure is supposed to be routine: take a captain's request, open a fresh set of records for the vessel in the archives, and enter the new ship into the registry so the rest of the yards can pick up the work. Somewhere in that procedure, a step is misconfigured, and every commission fails before it completes.
Your mission: repair the vessel commissioning procedure so the office can register new vessels again, from the captain's request all the way to a proper entry in the registry.
This Challenge Level’s architecture:
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A Backstage software template mirrors the story's commissioning chain: it gathers input, then runs scaffolder steps that render the service's files ( All infrastructure is pre-provisioned, with nothing to install. Gitea (the archives) runs in a Kubernetes cluster on port 30110; Backstage (the commission office) runs alongside as a standalone instance on port 3000, already wired to Gitea. |
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Good news: you can trust the platform. The Backstage app and its configuration, Gitea, and the cluster are all set up correctly, so you can leave them be. The bug lives in the vessel commissioning template, and that is the only thing you need to touch. Note: this Backstage has been trimmed to just what the challenge needs (the catalog and the scaffolder), so it is deliberately lighter than a full install. If some Backstage page or feature you would expect is missing, that is why. |
Walkthrough
1. Get started
The devcontainer is pre-configured and starts automatically. When you push from Codespaces, GitHub forks the repository to your account automatically.
Prefer working locally? Clone the repo and open it in any editor that supports the Dev Containers specification (VS CodeVisual Studio Code, JetBrains, and others). The devcontainer config will be detected automatically.
2. Open the Commission Office
Start Backstage with make backstage. The first run compiles for ~30-60s; once it's up, the commission office is available in your browser on port 3000. Leave it running: you'll see the logs in that terminal, and can restart any time with Ctrl-C then make backstage.
3. Explore the Setup
In the office (Backstage), go to Create: you'll find the Commission a Vessel template. Try running it: it won't get far, and that's expected. The template is broken, and your job is to repair it.
While you're in Create, explore its tabs: they're genuinely useful when working on templates, letting you browse the scaffolder's available actions and edit a template with a live preview and a safe dry-run. Poke around and see what each one does.
Open Gitea on port 30110 (the archives) and the Backstage catalog to see what does, and doesn't, make it through when you run the template
4. Repair the template
The only file you need to edit is the vessel commissioning template:
backstage/templates/vessel-commissioning/template.yaml
Read it from top to bottom. Its three sections, parameters (the form), steps (the commissioning procedure), and output (what the captain sees at the end), each have a 📖 documentation link above them. Compare each section against the challenge's Objective: the form, the steps, and the output each have something to put right.
Make your changes, try again, and once a vessel commissions cleanly, check your work. Keep Backstage running in its terminal while you do: make verify commissions a test vessel through it to confirm the repair.
make verifyHow to complete your challenge?
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When you push from Codespaces, GitHub forks the repository to your account automatically. If you are working locally, fork the repository on GitHub before pushing. |
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Verify your solution: |
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If it passes, it generates a Certificate of Completion you can paste into the discussion. |
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Share your solutions in this thread in answer below and mention your achievement on your LinkedIn account! |
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Toolbox |
Helpful documentation |
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Are you ready? Take the challenge’s mission!
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Don’t forget about benefits!
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Other levels of this challenge
| Intermediate | Coming soon |
| Expert | Coming soon |
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