A real-time progress bar tracking how far humanity has made it through the 21st century.

🌐 Live Site: damog.github.io/century-progress

This project started in February 2019, inspired by the amazing @year_progress Twitter account built by Filip Hráček. I wanted to take it further—a progress bar for the entire 21st century. Because who knows if humanity will make it to 2100, or if Twitter will even exist, or if the Internet as we know it will still be around?

The original implementation was an AWS Lambda function that tweeted to @century_bar every ~8.7 hours (roughly when the 3rd decimal place would change). It was a fun way to learn about:

• AWS Lambda and the serverless paradigm (I hadn't touched AWS since 2009!)
• Python 2.x (yes, this was 2019 and I was still learning Python 2)
• The Twitter API via TweetPony

The Lambda ran on AWS's free tier, costing essentially nothing. The dream was for it to tweet forever—well, until December 31st, 2100 at 23:59:59. I'd be 116 years old. I may have plans that day.

Here's the @century_bar account, frozen in time at 22.2% (March 2023):

Then Elon Musk happened.

In February 2023, Twitter killed free API access. What was once free now costs $100/month minimum. The @century_bar bot went silent—a casualty of the platform's new direction.

The irony isn't lost on me: when I started this project, I wondered if Twitter would still exist by 2100. Turns out the question was more immediate than expected.

Rather than pay $100/month to tweet a progress bar, I rebuilt the project as a static website hosted for free on GitHub Pages. No backend needed—the calculation happens entirely in your browser using JavaScript.

The new version is actually better:

• Real-time updates (every second, not every 8 hours)
• 8 decimal places of precision (the last digit ticks ~3 times per second!)
• Visual progress bar with 100 bars × 100 cells (10,000 total cells!)
• Time elapsed/remaining broken down to years, months, days, hours, minutes, seconds
• Local timezone support
• Zero cost, forever

The 21st century officially began on January 1, 2001 (not 2000) because the Gregorian calendar has no "year zero"—it goes directly from 1 BC to 1 AD. Thus:

• 1st century: years 1–100
• 2nd century: years 101–200
• ...
• 21st century: years 2001–2100

Wikipedia: 21st century

century-progress/
├── docs/                    # GitHub Pages static site
│   └── index.html           # The live website
├── src/                     # Legacy AWS Lambda (Python 2 + TweetPony)
│   └── lambda_function.py   # Original Twitter bot
├── src-modern/              # Modern AWS Lambda (Python 3 + Tweepy)
│   ├── lambda_function.py   # Updated for Twitter API v2
│   └── requirements.txt     # Dependencies
└── README.md

Pure client-side JavaScript. Features:

• 100 progress bars, each containing a 10×10 grid (100 cells)
• Each cell = 0.01% of the century
• 8 decimal precision (8th decimal updates every ~316ms)
• Runs entirely in your browser

The original 2019 implementation:

• Python 2.x (AWS deprecated this runtime in 2021)
• Uses TweetPony library (last updated 2015)
• Bundled dependencies (~2MB)

A cleaned-up Python 3.11+ version:

• Uses Tweepy for Twitter API v2
• Proper UTC timezone handling
• Single dependency (~200KB with tweepy)

Note: This requires a paid Twitter API subscription ($100/month) to actually post tweets.

1. Fork this repo
2. Go to Settings → Pages
3. Source: Deploy from branch
4. Branch: master (or main), Folder: /docs
5. Your site will be live at https://yourusername.github.io/century-progress/

cd src-modern
pip install -r requirements.txt -t .
zip -r ../lambda.zip .
# Upload to AWS Lambda (Python 3.11+ runtime)
# Set environment variables: CONSUMER_KEY, CONSUMER_SECRET, ACCESS_TOKEN_KEY, ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET, TWEET

• Total duration: 36,524 days (100 years, accounting for 24 leap years; 2100 is NOT a leap year)
• Total seconds: 3,155,673,600
• Update frequencies:
  • 8th decimal (0.00000001%): ~316 milliseconds
  • 7th decimal (0.0000001%): ~3.16 seconds
  • 6th decimal (0.000001%): ~31.6 seconds
  • 5th decimal (0.00001%): ~5 minutes 16 seconds
  • 4th decimal (0.0001%): ~52 minutes 36 seconds
  • 3rd decimal (0.001%): ~8 hours 46 minutes
  • 2nd decimal (0.01%): ~3.65 days
  • 1st decimal (0.1%): ~36.5 days

WTFPL — Do What The Fuck You Want To Public License.

David Moreno

• Website: damog.net
• GitHub: @damog

Here's to hoping we make it to 2100. See you at 100.00000000% 🎉