For a great while of my CP career I had no idea how such, at a first glance, insignificant things might affect the runtime of the code. And till this day I keep seeing many beginners having lack of knowledge about this effect, that's why I would like to share it here and hope it'll help you out someday.

First code: 164992399 — [1918ms]. In a while loop I access an element with parameter 2 at the else statement. This parameter just increases x and moves forward, while 2 first statements increase / decrease y + change an element in a matrix.

Second code: 164991769 — [280ms]. Here in a while loop I access an element with parameter 2 at the first if statement and other statements where I need to change matrix elements follow after.

You might not want to get in depth with all stuff written above, just notice 2 drastically different runtimes. The reason for that is pretty straightforward: in this code one of three IF statements gets a true response way more often than others. While the first code has an IF statement with 2 at the end, the second code has such IF statement at the beginning.

That is why you might want to dive into such things into your code when you get a TLE verdict or you feel you might hit the bound of some problem.