Appian just posted one of its best quarters as a public company.Appian (APPN -1.23%) has had a roller-coaster ride as a publicly traded company. After soaring in the early stages of the pandemic on high hopes for its low-code technology, the stock fell sharply in 2021. It has stayed down since then as software stocks have been generally under pressure following a "tech recession" in 2022, and slow growth since then.During that time, Appian has evolved into an artificial intelligence (AI)-based process autom ...